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#Post#: 57--------------------------------------------------
The Importance of Story
DIR By: Pam
Date: May 23, 2021, 11:23 am
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John Campbell
Adventure Developers
HTML http://web.archive.org/web/20130121122827/http://adventuredevelopers.com/features.php?start=15
I asked a gamer friend of mine to answer a pretty simple
question. “Tell me something about one of the characters in a
video game you’ve played recently.” He looked up from darning
his socks (or whatever he was doing), and told me to clarify.
“Not anything external, like appearance or the way they talk. I
mean that character as a person. The kind of thing you know
about someone after reading a good book.” He seemed a little
surprised by the question, so I told him it was for an article I
was writing.
This guy isn’t stupid, and knew what I was getting at. He
thought for a little while, and eventually told me, “You know,
games don’t usually do that.”
The general lack of story-telling in video games is pretty
pervasive (though not without exception). It is also, in my
opinion, a big waste. If there is any medium with which a story
could be conveyed powerfully, it’s video games for one simple
reason: interaction. The player must take part in the reality
the game creates, so they are already that much closer to things
like suspension of disbelief, immersion, and identification with
the characters.
There is a reason, of course, for the lack of stories. First and
foremost in my mind is capitalism. Perhaps I should explain.
Behind video games there is a pretty intense industry. Game
designing needs man-power, money, and distribution. What that
means is game designers need a decent company to back them, and
what that means is game designers need to know how to appeal to
business-minded individuals. Business-minded individuals know
that a game is not going to do well unless it is concretely
marketable, and what marketing needs is a few simple sentences
like, “The first game to _____” or, “By the makers of _____” or,
“If you like _____, you’ll like this game!”
This usually results in either a game that’s almost entirely
derivative, or in a frenzied battle for technological supremacy,
which requires inventive coders and original artists. Both these
options can leave story out in the cold to die. You simply can’t
put story on a box.
This doesn’t happen all the time. The gamer friend I was talking
to knocked on my door a few hours later and told me, “Max Payne.
That was developed. Just so you know.” Max Payne is the most
recent game I currently own, and it sees a decent amount of
playing time. The guys on my floor gather around and watch me
play it, but not because of its story.
There is an extremely elusive and magical thing called “fun”
that game developers want you to experience. This, I think, is
entirely legitimate. Video games are very much games, and as
such, game mechanics can trump storyline when there’s that
“fun-ness” involved. Some games, like board games, just don’t
need a story. I don’t know why, but the game ”flow" that came
out of the indie game jam last year still sits on my desktop,
and I’ll play it for a quick diversion just because it hits me
right. It’s different, and for what it’s worth, it’s fun for me.
I think this is legitimate as well.
The problem lies in the fact that games can do so much more, and
very few people are doing it. Games have been able to do much
more since the days of Zork. The economy we’re in (jeez, I
didn’t think this was going to be economical until I wrote it)
prevents people from doing something for a living unless it can
make people buy things constantly. Technology increases, so buy
a new computer, and new video games. They get old so throw them
away, keep buying. Old things don’t make sense to a lot of
people because we’re told otherwise. Surprisingly, no one needs
a 2 gig. machine to check e-mail.
It seems to have been forgotten that it’s okay for a video game
to not be “fun” in the “whee!” sense of the word—specifically
the “whee” that comes from ground-breaking visuals, but even the
general “whee” of being entertained. It has also been forgotten
that story, real substantial story, is an integral part of
“fun.”
I get to the point
This is where, finally, I get to amateur adventure games. Sorry
for the wait.
The two things that stop stories in the video game industry,
business and game-mechanic innovation, are absent here. We have
no one to sell these games to, no one we really have to please.
Most importantly, I think, the game mechanics are almost
entirely set for adventure games. We’re working with
puzzle-solving through inventory, dialogue, and basic
interactions with the environment. This means point-and-click
adventures have very little impact on gaming as far as
nitty-gritty technological advancements and the development of
new genres go. What we can do, however, is further the video
game as a story-telling device.
I’ve been lurking about the amateur adventure community off and
on for about (good gosh) five years now. So far, few games from
the amateur community have affected me by their stories. That
most definitely isn’t an insult. A couple games are really just
lots of fun. The Larry Vales series stands out in my memory the
most vividly, because Phil Reed is really freaking hilarious. It
also probably has one of the largest fan bases outside the AGS
community (from what I can gather), though it was made with AGS.
I bring this up because Phil has written a novel.
Comedy is chosen by a significant portion of adventure designers
because, I think, it can hold a player’s interest easily. No one
really cared about concluding the story in Sam & Max, but it was
pretty fun to do the next insane crap and hear lines like, “Aw,
it’s a cute little hypercephalic kitten.” A really great written
sense of humor is rare, and it’s even rarer for that to transfer
well into an adventure game. Comedies still require the basic
elements of a story, which makes Larry Vales work well.
There are two things I see stopping this community from creating
really wonderful story-centered games. The first is simply the
goal of the designer.
A large number of people go into the development of an adventure
game with this simple motivation: “I liked the old adventure
games; I want to make something like that.”
This was quite explicitly Yahtzee’s motivation for The Trials of
Odysseus Kent. It is what it says it is: an attempt at returning
to the old days. We should take it for what it is, but I hope
from all the drivel I was talking about earlier you can
understand that we as a community might have a chance to be
about more than nostalgia. We can seriously do something that’s
not really new as much as missing from current gaming trends.
We’re in a pretty special position, I think, to advance the
game-as-art, or at least as something more substantive. If we
can get it going, we will have created the market research
necessary for this type of thing to be mainstream.
It’s also very hard, I think, to maintain the motivation, “I
want to make a game” for the duration of a game’s development.
Let me tell you what took a significant portion of my life to
realize. Since qbasic came with ms-dos, I have been making all
sorts of games that I’ve never finished. Some of you may have
done the same thing. At some point during each game’s creation,
I have lost interest. Perhaps you have experienced this as well.
Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes.
Let’s make this general. Suppose you’re designing an
adventure—let’s even suppose you’ve done a good job planning and
are slowly developing the graphics along with implementing them
in the engine. Next, let’s suppose you play what’s taken you the
past few weeks or months (or more) to finish. You get the
spaceman out of his crashed spaceship, the average teenager his
homework back, or the pirate the map to the treasure. The game
exits out because that’s as far as you’ve designed. This part
here is key: you ask yourself, perhaps not even very
consciously, “I’m sorry, why do I care again?” And it’s a great
question.
Who really cares about the spaceman? I know I don’t, not really.
If you are out to make a game, you’re going to lose interest
unless you are just out-of-your-mind-obsessed with the idea of
making one. An extremely good question to ask yourself is: would
I care about this if it was just written down? Let me tell you,
I would sit down and read Grim Fandango. That’s probably not
something you should hope for this instant—I guess ask yourself
if you would listen to someone who was simply telling your game,
step by step.
So story writing could further the genre we’re working with and
increase people’s interest in it. It could also give
significance to something you’re working on. Instead of
thinking, “I want to make a game,” you could be thinking, “I
want to tell a story I’m so attached to and/or affected by that
I want other people to experience it.”
Here’s the second reason behind the general (hopefully I’m being
clear that this is not without exception) shallowness of amateur
adventures: The designers, you and I, don’t really know how to
write. We know what we like, and that we like some games that
seem to be, vaguely put, “developed.” We don’t know how that
works. Not really. I hope, in the next few articles, I can help.
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