Gaming Narrative: The Good, the Bad and the Examples
I've touched on gaming narratives before on the forum (that's a lie; I've been banging on about them, but whatever) and I'm always interested in seeing just what other people think about the whole concept of story in gaming. What do you consider to be good and bad aspects of narrative, and I always love to consume more and more stories (seeing as that's the best way to learn) and so I'd love to hear what everyone else considers to be their favourite gaming narratives out there and why they consider them to be so good?
Independent games with narrative focuses are on the rise, and this is where I want to spend my time in the growing SA industry and so every little thing I can learn, and every piece of art I can consume adds to my reference repertoire (which is already large but could always be bigger).
Side Note:
One other thing that I just happened to be thinking of today was about visual novels. You get visual novels with choices (I think most of them have story-based choices), but there are those that don't and are really just static stories told through visuals... do you consider that to be a game? Because there's no skill or decision making involved, so would you call it a game, or would you just call it a pure literary story that happens to be told in a game engine rather than in a Word document (or something)?
Independent games with narrative focuses are on the rise, and this is where I want to spend my time in the growing SA industry and so every little thing I can learn, and every piece of art I can consume adds to my reference repertoire (which is already large but could always be bigger).
Side Note:
One other thing that I just happened to be thinking of today was about visual novels. You get visual novels with choices (I think most of them have story-based choices), but there are those that don't and are really just static stories told through visuals... do you consider that to be a game? Because there's no skill or decision making involved, so would you call it a game, or would you just call it a pure literary story that happens to be told in a game engine rather than in a Word document (or something)?
Comments
In indie development we are challenged mostly by cash and time, but we must always remember an immensely important factor: attention span. without the budgets for marketing or massive glistening graphics to catch eyes with what the general audience deem as 'acceptable', we need to sell our games fast, or we fail already. Thus sadly we often don't have a massive amount of time for narrative and depth in such department, gameplay and aesthetics are often how we make our games more memetic rather than the challenging idea of kids in the playground talking about mad plots and stories.
What I am saying is narrative either needs to be a lot of the focus, to catch a viewer's ear, or disregard narrative and use narrative shorthand and tropes to quickly force an idea out.
But if you want to make a good story over a massive gameplay focus that is A-OKAY. it's simply challenging. VNs are often such cases, and are most often where you'll see strong narrative focus in indie development.
so what i mean by trope and narrative shorthand is the games often along the lines of 'beat dungeon because them goblins are ugly and stuff' or 'save the X by getting the Y(s)' or simply 'this is a thing that you do, so do it'.
An exception to this, granted hardly counting as a small deal, i feel is 2014s Transister, which fused gameplay and storytelling gorgeously, with a compelling narrative to simply drive beside the player as they went. BUT also had a Souls (of the dark and demon's variety) aspect to it's world building that the world was as deep as the player wanted it to be, they could find the nuggets of more storytelling, or just listen to a storybook while playing a game that was inherently fun to play.
I have a soft spot for the bioware style (previously the troika style) which is start writing about the story and detail and seemingly never think of stopping
said worlds are deep beyond your own expectation and wondrous to explore, but also the work of unbelievable talent and huge amounts of fingers at work. And still, my favourite game ever is Arcanum, which is still to me, utter perfection... (look at them lovely words)
The biggest issue here, I find, is that a marriage between gameplay and narrative is what is actually necessary, and that's the thing that's actually difficult. You can write a good story, you can create good gameplay, you can have a gorgeous art style and you can have phenomenal music and sound design... but it's all about combining these things, and that's why I think making games alone is really hard, ha ha.
But it did so many impressive things, like having a universe that didn't wait for the player, that some of the greatest drama's in the story were playing out on their own timeframes, and the player was just one of the actors involved. There are very few games that even try to achieve this.
The writing was quite strong as well, but it's the sheer number of ideas that got crammed into that one game that make it stand out for me head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.
They did a post mortem on developing the game at this year's GDC: http://gdcvault.com/play/1021863/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Star
(Star Control 2 was very influential for the Mass Effect series. Though I feel that for all the things that Mass Effect improved upon the very old game of Star Control 2, there are a lot of great things that didn't make it into Mass Effect)
A game that stands out for me as doing narrative bad is Prototype. It epitomizes for me ludo-narrative dissonance, in that the character they try imbue the protagonist with is entirely at odd with the action of the game. It's almost so bad as to be funny, except it takes itself so so seriously as to rob the player even of that pleasure.
I think Zero Punctuation talked a bit about the terrible narrative in Prototype:
I haven't played the open source Starcontrol 2 myself (though from what I understand it is sanctioned and even contributed to by the original creators). I think if you try it now you'll probably get an idea of how brilliant it was back in its day (and be able to see the brilliant bits that remain brilliant). But I wouldn't expect you to have the patience to finish it. It's got 1992 levels of expectations of patience.
5 Days a Stranger (http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/5days/) is the first of the Chzo Mythos series... which may be my favourite series of indie games ever created (possibly). Check it out if you like horror-themed, story-centric, point-and-click adventure games in the old school vein of LucasArts. Although I did encounter compatibility issues when trying to play them recently on a modern system. There's no need to worry about me and old games. I love the older games and I always try to play them as if I was playing them back then; I'm the same with old books and movies. I will definitely check it out, although I may have to wait a while seeing as my shoddy internet connection kept failing on me while trying to download during the installation process... so I'll get to it when technology decides to be nice to me, ha ha.
But when I bought it for PS3 on the PSN, I played 10 minutes before realising I really, really couldn't stand playing through its archaic systems anymore. Random encounters, slow as hell, long delay going in/out of combat, etc... The pacing really killed it for me.
Catherine was an interesting game but was mostly about infidelity rather than romance, and The Darkness (that's the first one not the cel-shaded sequel) had one of the few realistic relationships I've seen in a game (you know, between all the heart eating and the dissections and stuff), and of course Christine Love's work. But other than these I don't really see anything meaningful being done with romance, and romance (while not a topic I explore often) is something I found interesting for exploring narratives.
I recently decided to try out one of those dating sims, but it was so unrealistic in its depiction of romance and it was also just badly written; anyone got any suggestions for games that show proper romance?
For those who want very interesting narratives surrounding love and sexuality I'd recommend Christine Love's work (I mentioned her earlier), and two of her games can be downloaded free (her other one is Analogue: A Hate Story, which is on Steam):
Digital: A Love Story (http://scoutshonour.com/digital/) is an interesting one about an online romance of sorts. Very unusual in its subject matter as well as execution.
don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story (http://scoutshonour.com/donttakeitpersonallybabeitjustaintyourstory/) is also an interesting one in how it deals with sexuality as well as the concept of privacy in the modern (and not-so-distant future) age.
These two games are visual novels though... so they don't exactly engage through gameplay, and it's through text that they tell their stories.