Square: Game Stories Can Surpass Film

[Keane Ng]

Square: Game Stories Can Surpass Film

Square-Enix, the makers of some of the most story-heavy games around, think that the storytelling power of games can surpass that of film and drama, but there are a few hurdles to get past along the way.

Some people love games with strong stories. Some people think stories just get in the way [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88905-Braid-Dev-Story-Based-Games-Are-Bogus]. This debate, and let me use the fancy term, ludology vs. narratology, will probably be as eternal as the argument over whether or not Resident Evil 5 is racist. Square-Enix's Yoshinori Yamagishi, the producer of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, unsurprisingly, sits squarely in the narratology camp, but he thinks it'll still take some work to get game stories to where they ought to be.

"As opposed to films, books and TV, as a medium it is more of a challenge to produce a game in order to tell a story," Yamagishi told CVG [http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=209939]. In TV, films and drama, the creator (or creators) has thorough control over how their story is told to the audience, so it's easy to pull heartstrings whenever they want to. For games, however, it's not as easy as that.

"In (a developer's) case we always have to think about how players might react to each depiction of a character or storyline, and that's the part we can't predict," Yamagishi explained. "Nevertheless we have to make these predictions to a certain degree, and incorporate this into our work. So it's more of a challenge."

I'm going to have to take issue with part of this argument. A novelist or playwright or film director really don't have some sort of god-like control over how their audience will react to their stories any more than a game developer does. An audience will do whatever they want with a story once it's theirs to consume, doesn't matter what the creator thinks.

Yamagishi could be talking about how in TV/books/movies, the story tells itself while in games the player advances the plot as they play - therein lies the risk of somebody just turning the game off if they don't like it. But I can stop reading a book or watching a movie if I don't like it either.

That aside, Yamagishi believes that if this obstacle can be overcome, game stories can deliver narrative experiences superior to any other storytelling medium. "But if we manage to get over this hurdle, then I regard videogames as a greater medium to provide people with deep emotional and exciting experiences," he said.

I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things. But hey, he's trying.

Permalink

 

[TsunamiWombat]

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

Whoa! This title was about videogame vs movies a minute ago. On topic!

There's a Red Box (which is the same thing as this but for movies) in my store, it's usually cheaper then renting from a blockbuster as long as you don't keep it for too long. An Xbox360 game from Blockbuster is probably... what, $10 a week?

So this would be cheaper as long as you only keep the game for 4 days.

SONOFABITCH IT CHANGED AGAIN!

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

 

[John Funk]

Films clearly don't have enough belts on the characters.

 

[mr mcshiznit]

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

But see then they alienate hardcores like myself who love stale(i.e. turnbased?)gameplay and long cutscenes.

 

[Fronken]

Sorry to say this but: No shit sherlock.

Seriously, i thought this was common knowledge amongst gamers? :S

 

[Inverse Skies]

Whilst this may be a huge call I could potentially see it happening. Sqaure-Enix is a company noted for putting a lot of effort and thought into characters and storyline though, so whilst their stories might be better than the average films and their characters much deeper than most others it can't just be up to them to tow the line.

A lot of other gaming companies do also try very hard to make their characters deep (Valve, Konami with the MGS series spring to mind here) with involving storylines, but in order for games to truly take over movies as a form of interactive storytelling all games will have to follow these trends, and making original plots (which a lot of gaming companies struggle with even nowadays) as well as characters the audience is able to sympathise with (also a massive ask) is a steep hill to climb.

Basically the idea is theoretically possible, but Sqaure-Enix are seeing it from behind their own deep storylines and characters. The rest of the industry has quite some way to go before they all reach that same level.

 

[Enigmers]

I think putting a good storyline into a game is somewhat easier than in a movie, because you can have a game that lasts ten hours or forty hours or over a hundred hours, whereas films have to be short enough for the bladderically-challenged to be able to sit through it without pissing themselves in the theater.

 

[Flishiz]

I only agree about games because you can have an effect on the story, and let you feel like you're a part of the action. SE, ironically, seems to have the most disconnecting player-to-character experiences out there. MGS did some of the same, but at least in that you could slit someone's throat, rather than have 5 drop down menus that lead to watching Snake hop around, slit a throat which does like 1/16 of their health down, then jumps 10 feet back.

 

[GloatingSwine]

I only agree about games because you can have an effect on the story

Having an effect on the story isn't really the important thing. The important thing is that the player's actions in uncovering the story mean that it progresses at the pace and level of detail they set for themselves, and make even the act of playing through an unchanging storyline an interactive process under the control of the player.

As noted though, long cutscenes where the player is not in control of uncovering the story break that interactive process, and reduce games to the level of movies and TV at best, and frequently far lower, because there's not quite the money invested in game narrative.

The trick, therefore, is to tell more of the story through the actions of characters and interactive components of the game, and flesh out the side details by the player's interaction with NPCs and investigation of the world. I think that Star Ocean games have generally been quite good at this, they don't tend to have monstrously long cutscenes, and even when there are sections where the player is constrained in movements somewhat, usually at the start, like in SO1 and SO3, there are plenty of NPCs to talk to and non-critical places to explore to flesh out the areas, world, and story, and actual storytelling tends to occur because Stuff Is Happening, rather than because a cutscene kicks in and you wander off to get a coke and have a piss. (Yes, Eternal Sonata, I am looking at you, fucking cutscenes so long your controller powers down to save batteries)

 

[matrix3509]

I believe the guy from Square is right, games have the potential to be as rich as movies or books. However, I think the current trend of telling stories through the medium of JRPGs is going wholly in the wrong direction. JRPG are examples of railroading in the absolute worst form (Tabletop gamers know what I'm talking about). They are taking a unique medium (videogames in general) known for its interactibility, and reducing it to where the player has no choice but go along with the story. You might as well read a book or watch a movie for all the interacting you do.

However, a story can only go in so many directions and a developer would never be able to try to account for every decision a player might make. The key is, of course, immersion. With immersion you can make the player belive they are playing a game at their own pace. Until developers get immersion down, they will never even approach the richness of literature or film.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

They just have to make it so people just don't skip the cut scenes...

No. It's all fine and dandy if I'm into the story, but if I don't want to sit through half an hour of boring and badly acted exposition then I really should not have to do so.

The trick, therefore, is to tell more of the story through the actions of characters and interactive components of the game, and flesh out the side details by the player's interaction with NPCs and investigation of the world.

Though, not an RPG, I do love how valve delivered the story in the Half-Life series. You progressed simply by playing, and were never really disembodied from Freeman. In a way it contradicts what I stated above, but you're not static during exposition. Valve seemed to leave some toys around to play with while you wait for the game to progress.

 

[Joeshie]

Films clearly don't have enough belts on the characters.

I love you.

On a related note, absolutely nothing that Square-Enix has done has come anywhere close to the cream of the crop of film stories. Not that it isn't expected, what with video games being such a much younger medium than film, but we still have a long way to go even to be on the same level as film stories.

 

[Rodger]

I think Square needs to take a page out of some of their other non-FF and non-DQ franchises as far as story goes. Like, say, Star Ocean. Or Chrono Trigger. Both better series than Final Fantasy in my opinion.

At the very least Square could start implementing multiple endings in Final Fantasy and then not make any sequels, thus never declaring any specific ending to be canon. The player gets an ending based on their decisions/actions and can try again in a New Game+ if they're not happy with it or got a bad end. Of course, I highly doubt Square would ever do anything like this, but if Final Fantasy 13 has no sequels/prequels and alternate endings based on the player's choices then I will eat my hat. Thats not to say FF13 might not be good, I'll wait until it comes out for the PS4 before I decide that.

As its been said, though, when it comes to games you can't just craft a story and try to make it something everyone will accept as there will always be some issue with it. The story might still be good, but not everyone is going to like it and many people will want the option to have done something differently. Maybe some people wanted to stab Aeris/Aerith themselves and save Sephiroth the trouble? Maybe we wanted to take a swipe at Sephiroth in the temple of the ancients instead of listening to his monologue? That last one in particular always bugged me...

Of course, this isn't to say Square hasn't made a valiant effort to do better than films. They've taken two shots at a Final Fantasy version of Star Wars, afterall.

 

[Keane Ng]

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

Whoa! This title was about videogame vs movies a minute ago. On topic!

There's a Red Box (which is the same thing as this but for movies) in my store, it's usually cheaper then renting from a blockbuster as long as you don't keep it for too long. An Xbox360 game from Blockbuster is probably... what, $10 a week?

So this would be cheaper as long as you only keep the game for 4 days.

SONOFABITCH IT CHANGED AGAIN!

The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay.

Hahaha, that was my bad, sorry for that.

 

[Graustein]

I agree. Properly executed, a game can be essentially a novel or a movie, told in the second person. A perfect example is that scene from Chrono Trigger where Lucca relives her mum being crippled. It's not "Lucca runs out of the room, rushes downstairs, fumbles desperately with the machine." It's you doing the running. You're the one searching frantically for the off switch, you are fumbling with the controls while trying to remember the passcode to turn that damn machine off before it cripples your mother.

No other medium can so completely immerse you in the story. The problem is that video games as a medium have evolved as... well, as games. As form entertainment first and foremost. It's not that it can't be done, it's that the audience's expectations tend to revolve more around the mechanics and graphics as opposed to how deeply it can pull you in, as well as that we haven't really had much practice in doing this with our games.

 

[zoozilla]

I think that if game devs started looking at story as an integral part of the gaming experience, game stories could very easily surpass movies and TV.

The trick is integration. That's the thing that I don't think game devs have quite perfected yet, the integration between story and gameplay.