Dear Esther Creator: It's a Bit Like Minecraft

[The Wooster]

Dear Esther Creator: It's a Bit Like Minecraft

Dear Esther creator, Dan Pinchbeck, on storytelling and imagination.

According to creator, Dan Pinchbeck, Dear Esther has something vital in common with indie mega-hit, Minecraft. Well, actually, it's not so much a "thing" as a lack thereof. Minecraft and Dear Esther both lack the same thing: a predefined narrative.

"We're not in the business of writing a plot -- we're in the business of giving you the tools to create your own," Pinchbeck said at GDC Europe today. "There is nothing more powerful than your own imagination."

Pinchbeck argues that Dear Esther is "a bit like story Minecraft." In Minecraft, players arrange blocks into pleasing (and often phallic) shapes; in Dear Esther the game semi-randomly chooses snippets of narration to create a vague storyline. Both games rely more on atmosphere than a traditional narrative thrust.

According to Pinchbeck, players often make a "story" out of anything they do, and thus, such stories are "an inevitable product of playing the game." He argues that developers don't need to constrain players to a set storyline, instead they should use what story there is to deepen the tone and complexity of the game world.

"Use your story to represent the representable," he said. "Story is inevitable - so why write the obvious?"

Source: Gamasutra [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/175842/What_Dear_Esther_and_Minecraft_have_in_common.php]


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[King of Asgaard]

Yet Minecraft sold on the basis of unrestricted sandbox construction and exploration.
Dear Esther was sold with the promise of a unique story-telling experience.
Besides, DE is only 90 minutes give or take, and it's really dull. At least Minecraft lets you spawn a stack of TNT and blow shit up should you want to, or build some truly incredible structures. What does DE offer?

 

[Fanta Grape]

As a fan of both games, I think it's a bit silly to compare them. Dear Esther had a pretty well defined plot, or at least very strong "themes" and I think some parts were too specific and some parts were too ambiguous to let it be a story made by your imagination. Don't get me wrong, it's great, but I wasn't imagining a lot. Minecraft functions on creativity and gives you tools to apply that creativity. Dear Esther gave you the tools, the materials, the allen key but gave you the instructions in Swedish.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Too bad Dear Esther isn't actually a good game. An interesting experiment, sure. But I'd say it could be vastly improved with better pacing et al by choosing a different medium.

But then, I'm the sort of guy who likes to have more gameplay in his games than simply walking.

 

[maninahat]

Whilst playing Esther I did get a familiar sense of exploration, traversing over cliff faces, spelunking etc. Atmosphere is one of the best thing going for game narratives, so any game that plays up to that strength is a winner, in my book.

 

[Zhukov]

That is not accurate.

Dear Esther has a story, even if it is decidedly vague.

It doesn't give you any freedom. You cannot "create your own plot". You just walk forward while listening to a narrator.

I don't dislike Dear Esther, hell I kind of enjoyed it, but that guy is talking rubbish.

 

[JWRosser]

Interesting comparison....though the only time that I would really relate the two is the way that when you describe the game, it sounds awful, yet when you play it, it's amazing.

Play Minecraft! It has blocky graphics and you mine...and craft things!
Try Dear Esther! You walk around an island listening to poetic narration!

Both games are brilliant, in my opinion...but completely different. I've played through (or, watched someone play through) Dear Esther twice now and it never ceases to amaze me.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I must be the only one that had no idea wtf DE was and, despite already being on the way to wikipedia on an unrelated matter, still doesn't care to.

EDIT: It would have served the News Story much better had they stated a little something about DE at all. I mean its just basically a story about some random guy attached to a game I've never heard of who is comparing his game to MINECRAFT which you basically have to live under a rock if you use the internet and haven't heard of it before. I assumed it was just a publicity piece so that people would check out his game, that could be in any genre, for any system at all, or it could not even be a game at all it could be like that PSN title Linger in Shadows which is a POS and not worth anyone's money.

So I offer the opinion that this news story, for anyone not aware of Dear Esther AT ALL, has absolutely zero to offer the reader. It may as well be about a guy that makes printing presses saying that his product is just the same as MS Word because you can use your imagination to produce limitless narrative possibilities on both products.

That this asshole is considered newsworthy in the first place is amazing. Someone comparing his rotten apple to a money printing Orange like Minecraft because "hey they both come from trees" is not a news story.

Bottom line this news story offers a decent quote from a guy that no one would have ever listened to if he hadn't had the word Minecraft in it. That was the gist of my original statement of more or less "meh."

The reason for this edit is that apparently a mod on these forums has taken it upon themselves to harass me and it would be a shame if I got flagged for not offing anything to this discussion.

 

[Azuaron]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

 

[Jhooud]

Too bad Dear Esther isn't actually a good game. An interesting experiment, sure. But I'd say it could be vastly improved with better pacing et al by choosing a different medium.

But then, I'm the sort of guy who likes to have more gameplay in his games than simply walking.

I think that's the particular problem with their experiment - they're using a medium in a way that just doesn't feel quite right to the audience. Amnesia had a very minimalist interface, and that feeling of discovery as you uncovered the story, but was still very much a game. Dear Esther used the trappings of a game without any of the conflict (puzzles, monsters, etc.) we expect within those trappings.

I'm still glad to have given it a go, but - for me - it wasn't an experiment I'd want to see others copy.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

'Story is inevitable, why write the obvious?'

Interesting point actually. I sometimes find that the best stories in games, the ones you really remember, are the ones that happen outside of the game's actual narrative.

For example playing a game of Star Wars Galactic Battlefront match and you end up teaming up with one soldier, then that soldier (inevitably) gets killed, you can let your imagination run riot.

Or the go to example of this for me, Rome: Total War. I was playing at the Scipii one time, and I took a single army all the way across the desert, led by one Cavalry unit with the same captain the whole way. Conquered my way clear across to Tingi, but then I tried to move into Spain, and the army was slaughtered to a man.

I took three armies of the strongest troops I could muster, led by the very best generals, marched my way through Europe burning everything and everyone in my path, all to avenge my lost legion.

Now there's a story I remember, and it was completely outside the game's control.

Of course, from what I hear this experiment wasn't quite so succesful with Dear Esther, but nice try, please don't stop.

 

[The.Bard]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

I feel sad for you. Imagination in gaming is absolutely paramount for me. While driving across the endless planets in Mass Effect 1, I would make up stories and dialogues in my head. GTA IV is RIPE for the imaginative taking! You spend so much of the game making things up as you go along, and Skyrim? Are you kidding me? SKYRIM, dude! If you don't create your own story in Skyrim, why are you even playing it!? There's, like, nothing in Skyrim narratively without your imagination.

Anywho, it's totally fine if you don't feel the same and your imagination just didn't fire up playing Dear Esther, but saying that it's only possible for a meaningful story to exist if they are baked in? Maybe FOR YOU. But on the grand cosmic scale of things?

BZZZZT! WRONG ANSWER.

 

[Bindal]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

I feel sad for you. Imagination in gaming is absolutely paramount for me. While driving across the endless planets in Mass Effect 1, I would make up stories and dialogues in my head. GTA IV is RIPE for the imaginative taking! You spend so much of the game making things up as you go along, and Skyrim? Are you kidding me? SKYRIM, dude! If you don't create your own story in Skyrim, why are you even playing it!? There's, like, nothing in Skyrim narratively without your imagination.

Anywho, it's totally fine if you don't feel the same and your imagination just didn't fire up playing Dear Esther, but saying that it's only possible for a meaningful story to exist if they are baked in? Maybe FOR YOU. But on the grand cosmic scale of things?

Oh, Dear Esther sure let me imagine things. Like playing ACTUAL GAMES and not audio books trying to pretend to be games.
Seriously, Dear Esther is an absolute horrible GAME in every way imaginable - mostly because it simply has no fucking gameplay. A game without gameplay is a movie. You just watch it. And in case of Dear Esther, there isn't even much going on you could watch. (No, "nice scenery" doesn't count - I want to see THINGS HAPPEN)
So, Dear Esther is just an audio book - and how an audio book can be "like Minecraft" and "allow to make my own story" is beyond me. You don't "choose" your story, you listen to a randomly picked line. You have no choice other than "move" and "don't move" - and that isn't really a choice as doing nothing won't make anything different happen. Instead, nothing at all is happening.


So, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it - Dear Esther sucks as game but is a decent audio book.

 

[Eternal_Lament]

Except not at all. Minecraft has you create your own story because there is indeed nothing except your imagination driving the events, Dear Esther has no clear narrative in so much as it is giving you things sort of peace-meal. It still has a narrative, all you need to do is play the game multiple times to get every piece to finally figure out what's going on. Minecraft is indeed a narrative-less game because the focus is on what the player wants at that moment, while Dear Esther has a narrative that's just trying to be needlessly complex about it by delaying and mixing the order of events.

His argument about players making their own story as they play, which is actually very valid, doesn't really apply to Dear Esther because of it's linearity. If it were say a game that could be finished by taking different paths or routes then there would indeed be that aspect of "I'm creating my own story here because of the many ways I could finish the game this is the one I chose". I forget the exact name, but the other one the Chinese room is doing that's called "We're all going to rapture" seems to be doing that.

Besides which, it's obvious that the comparison to Minecraft is more for publicity sake than honesty's sake. Minecraft isn't the first narrative-less game, it's just the most recent one that's also on everyone's mind.

 

[Azuaron]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

I feel sad for you. Imagination in gaming is absolutely paramount for me. While driving across the endless planets in Mass Effect 1, I would make up stories and dialogues in my head. GTA IV is RIPE for the imaginative taking! You spend so much of the game making things up as you go along, and Skyrim? Are you kidding me? SKYRIM, dude! If you don't create your own story in Skyrim, why are you even playing it!? There's, like, nothing in Skyrim narratively without your imagination.

Anywho, it's totally fine if you don't feel the same and your imagination just didn't fire up playing Dear Esther, but saying that it's only possible for a meaningful story to exist if they are baked in? Maybe FOR YOU. But on the grand cosmic scale of things?

BZZZZT! WRONG ANSWER.

You are wrong, by definition.

If a story does not exist in a game, and you are using your imagination to make up your own story, then there is not a meaningful story in that game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I thoroughly enjoyed Minecraft, and my lone survivor of a crashed spaceship trying to survive this new planet's apocalypse [http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/20]. I will frequently add internal monologs and motivations to RPG characters that the games do not provide.

But what I create in my imagination is my meaningful story, not the meaningful story of the game. For the game to have a meaningful story, it must be created by the designers.

Like, if I handed you a book and told you it was the greatest story ever written, but it was empty and I told you that you had to write the story, or maybe it had chapter prompts, bare skeletons--not even full skeletons, just a ribcage or so--of scene, not even a plot, that book would not have a story. That book may be interesting in its own right, and people may create great stories out of it, but it has no story of its own.

Basically, they are different goals [http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/eccj9t/hey-ash--whatcha-playin---dinner-metaphors]. While it's good to have games that are about creating your own story, it is at least as important (I would argue more important, but that's because I like RPGs with strong narrative) to have story-driven games, and Pinchbeck is saying that developers should do away with story-driven games. Videogames are a medium unique in their ability to place people personally in different situations, and to experience stories in ways that we never have before.

And he's saying, "Screw that, players will imagine their own story." You know what, as a writer, I already have my own stories. I have lots of them. I know how I think. I'm very familiar with the stories I create. Sometimes (quite often, really), I want to experience stories that other people create. People who are not me, who do not think like me. People who create stories that show me a different way of looking at the world.

Then, armed with this new way of looking at the world, I can create even more stories, stories I never would have dreamed of if I was left alone on a deserted island with only sandbox games.

 

[TKretts3]

So basically what he's saying is that Dear Esther is like Minecraft, in that it gives you blocks (Of speech), but lets you arrange them how you think they fit best. That's a fair comparison.

 

[The.Bard]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

I feel sad for you. Imagination in gaming is absolutely paramount for me. While driving across the endless planets in Mass Effect 1, I would make up stories and dialogues in my head. GTA IV is RIPE for the imaginative taking! You spend so much of the game making things up as you go along, and Skyrim? Are you kidding me? SKYRIM, dude! If you don't create your own story in Skyrim, why are you even playing it!? There's, like, nothing in Skyrim narratively without your imagination.

Anywho, it's totally fine if you don't feel the same and your imagination just didn't fire up playing Dear Esther, but saying that it's only possible for a meaningful story to exist if they are baked in? Maybe FOR YOU. But on the grand cosmic scale of things?

BZZZZT! WRONG ANSWER.

You are wrong, by definition.

If a story does not exist in a game, and you are using your imagination to make up your own story, then there is not a meaningful story in that game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I thoroughly enjoyed Minecraft, and my lone survivor of a crashed spaceship trying to survive this new planet's apocalypse [http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/09/20]. I will frequently add internal monologs and motivations to RPG characters that the games do not provide.

But what I create in my imagination is my meaningful story, not the meaningful story of the game. For the game to have a meaningful story, it must be created by the designers.

Like, if I handed you a book and told you it was the greatest story ever written, but it was empty and I told you that you had to write the story, or maybe it had chapter prompts, bare skeletons--not even full skeletons, just a ribcage or so--of scene, not even a plot, that book would not have a story. That book may be interesting in its own right, and people may create great stories out of it, but it has no story of its own.

Basically, they are different goals [http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/eccj9t/hey-ash--whatcha-playin---dinner-metaphors]. While it's good to have games that are about creating your own story, it is at least as important (I would argue more important, but that's because I like RPGs with strong narrative) to have story-driven games, and Pinchbeck is saying that developers should do away with story-driven games. Videogames are a medium unique in their ability to place people personally in different situations, and to experience stories in ways that we never have before.

And he's saying, "Screw that, players will imagine their own story." You know what, as a writer, I already have my own stories. I have lots of them. I know how I think. I'm very familiar with the stories I create. Sometimes (quite often, really), I want to experience stories that other people create. People who are not me, who do not think like me. People who create stories that show me a different way of looking at the world.

Then, armed with this new way of looking at the world, I can create even more stories, stories I never would have dreamed of if I was left alone on a deserted island with only sandbox games.

From one human to another, don't tell someone they're "wrong by definition" and then jump into why by arguing the semantics of what YOU SAID, not what they said. It makes you look like a stupid meany jerkface. By definition, everything I said - as I said it - is true, and I stand by it. 8P

Is there another article somewhere that I missed? You are attributing things to him that I'm not seeing anywhere in this article or the Gamasutra link it goes to. His entire point was that players can create their own personal gaming stories WITHOUT having it handed to them. I didn't see anything about what makes a meaningful narrative or where the future of narratives in gaming needs to go. He just said "Players have imagination, and Dear Esther was a game about fueling narrative with it."

You seem to be arguing that he said Dear Esther has - without question - meaningful narrative. He never said that. Not even once. Unless there's another article I missed somewhere, in which case I will redact my statement...

To roll with your analogy, he's not giving you a blank notebook and saying "Hey, this is a great story!" He's saying "Hey, I thought, instead of writing a story for you, maybe you would enjoy writing one for yourself? I put a few images in here to fuel your fires, now let's see what you come up with!"

Personally, I find that to be a refreshing change in a game. Would I want EVERY game to do this? No, but when it's done well, it's a powerful thing.

 

[The.Bard]

Oh man, if Dear Esther lets me create my own story, I can use it to play out Mass Effect 3! Or Dragon Age II! Or Skyrim! Or GTA! Or...

Oh, you can't do that? For meaningful stories to exist in games, the designers have to actually write them, and this guy's a total idiot? Oh...

I feel sad for you. Imagination in gaming is absolutely paramount for me. While driving across the endless planets in Mass Effect 1, I would make up stories and dialogues in my head. GTA IV is RIPE for the imaginative taking! You spend so much of the game making things up as you go along, and Skyrim? Are you kidding me? SKYRIM, dude! If you don't create your own story in Skyrim, why are you even playing it!? There's, like, nothing in Skyrim narratively without your imagination.

Anywho, it's totally fine if you don't feel the same and your imagination just didn't fire up playing Dear Esther, but saying that it's only possible for a meaningful story to exist if they are baked in? Maybe FOR YOU. But on the grand cosmic scale of things?

Oh, Dear Esther sure let me imagine things. Like playing ACTUAL GAMES and not audio books trying to pretend to be games.
Seriously, Dear Esther is an absolute horrible GAME in every way imaginable - mostly because it simply has no fucking gameplay. A game without gameplay is a movie. You just watch it. And in case of Dear Esther, there isn't even much going on you could watch. (No, "nice scenery" doesn't count - I want to see THINGS HAPPEN)
So, Dear Esther is just an audio book - and how an audio book can be "like Minecraft" and "allow to make my own story" is beyond me. You don't "choose" your story, you listen to a randomly picked line. You have no choice other than "move" and "don't move" - and that isn't really a choice as doing nothing won't make anything different happen. Instead, nothing at all is happening.


So, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it - Dear Esther sucks as game but is a decent audio book.

It's cool that you didn't like it, but trying to argue whether it's a game is like trying to iceskate uphill. At what point is something a game? Who is the arbiter for that? It controls like a game, saves/loads like a game, you make choices in where to go... is it because you don't kill anyone? No, plenty of games have no violence. Is it because there's no score? No, plenty of games don't track scores.

Would a silent black and white movie not be considered a movie because it has no audio?

We can argue all day, but I would posit that Dear Esther loses EVERYTHING as an audiobook. It HAS to be a game, because any other medium would not have the same impact. The key to it is you walking around and exploring this island for yourself.

I found it to be quite thought provoking and moving, but I fully understand the crowd who fully appreciates it is probably tiny.