305: The Story Sucks

[jspock]

FFS, would the entire industry please stop using the Hero's Journey as if it is some sort of literary ideal? The Hero's Journey is limited, linear, archaic, and inflexible. Seriously, if we sat down and came up with adjectives that we would never want to apply to a game story it would be hard to beat those four.

The Hero's Journey, let's say it all together, was an exploration of Jungian psychology and the monomyth, and in particular a fascinating study of the similarities between certain archetypal tales from different cultures across the world. Taking it as some sort of ideal blueprint for a game narrative is not just wildly off-base; it's a lazy attempt to find convenient cut-and-paste shortcuts instead of doing the hard work of crafting a good story.

The Hero's Journey is great anthropology. Let's leave it there.

 

[Aisaku]

It's hard for me to take seriously an article that says Bioshock is lacking while at the same time propping up a Zelda game as acomplished storytelling.

Setting that aside, the larger issue connecting these two games is morality, dealing with the consequences of one's actions. And here is where videogames hit a roadblock. It's harder than ever to allow players to deviate from the standard story and allow them to decide their character's fate because it's prohibitely expensive to produce enough content to consider all posssibilities. With limited choices, morality becomes hollow.

Take Mass Effect for example: after repeated playthroughs I've become ever more certain that they build the Paragon route first, then allow for some heckling, but you never really stray from the set path, never get to go all the way.

 

[JMeganSnow]

An excellent and thoughtful argument. It does speak to a problem with games, but does make the overall assumption that games ought to do more than entertain, and should aim to educate the person through moral decision making.

He's not arguing that games "ought" to present only specific moral challenges in order to educate, he's just using specific examples that are familiar to him and probably represent something HE would enjoy playing. I wouldn't however, I'd find the messages cloying, inane, and deeply disturbing.

Some RPG's claim that they let you make choices--and they do offer choices, but they're all surface choices. They let you choose what goofy thing your character does, whether sycophantically letting people push you around or viciously murdering them. They don't EVER let you choose what message you take away, which I think would be the most interesting and powerful way to use the interactivity of a game to better tell a story.

What most games do, is have your choices matter very little: it'll change who is alive at the end of the quest. Eh. Some games will give you a canned consequence: if you kill everyone, some of your party members get mad at you. Others like you. At the end of the game you get a little epilogue blurb telling you about how nice/awful things turned out because of what you did. Whatever.

But what if the game was structured in such a way that your actions really affect the NATURE of the consequences? Not, some people like you, some people hate you, but instead, if you play as a ruthless money-grubbing bastard, the game becomes the story of a ruthless money-grubbing bastard. The sweetness and light "nice" people who sneered at you get shat on by fate (or you), whereas the hardassed wheeler-dealers actually do benefit.

Dragon Age did something similar to this in a couple of instances (Bhelen) but it was poorly implemented because your initial decision allowed you no *motivation* other than the blatantly obvious. You could tell Harrowmont you thought Bhelen was a twerp, or you could go with Bhelen apparently because he was offering you a better deal. This is an extremely shallow motivation that only a completely blank and pointless character would have. In order to allow you a distinct motivation, though, they would have only had to give you one or two more conversation options and some kind of midpoint option. What if you could tell Harrowmont you're going with him *despite* him being a narrow-minded traditionalist, because you really do think Bhelen's guilty? And then, what if at the midpoint decision of this chain, you could sabotage Harrowmont in such a way as to *force* him to act more liberally? Now you have FOUR character options, FOUR possible motivations, and having the ability to choose between them makes even the straightforward ones grant more characterization to your protagonist.

It is not really necessary that the protagonist go through some kind of Resurrection in a game. Just being able to CREATE an actual CHARACTERIZATION of your protagonist would be a huge thing. And it'd be far better than trying to ram some sort of lecture on sacrifice down the throats of people not interested in that kind of thing.

 

[darth jacen]

I found that article to be interesting and thought provoking as I compared my favorite games to this template of necessary internal conflict and most passed. I think that this is something, which all game developers must take into consideration. Thank you for this very interesting article.

 

[Theysaid]

You missed the resurrection moment in Bioshock. *Spoilers* It wasn't the character but the player that needed to change and that was supposed to come during the final escort quest. At this point the Little Sisters were no longer invulnerable but they also had nothing to offer. If a Little Sister died at this point you could just grab another from an infinite supply. There was no reason to defend them except the idea that you were there to protect them. Otherwise you were using the valuable resources that you had collected throughout the game to protect them instead of saving them for the final boss as you normally would in any game. This was a point in the game that called for selfless sacrifice from the player, and if you did protect the Little Sister you had passed through your resurrection moment.

It's been a while since I played Bioshock, so I'll have to take your word for this. If its true, its a good point. I protected the Little Sisters throughout the game so for me this part of the story was actually no different. I guess in my case my "resurrection" came right after the first choice to save a Little Sister.

I don't think Bioshock fails as a story. You might go through the game looking at the Little Sisters as a means to an end to stop Fontaine, and if you use the Little Sisters as a resource you ultimately "lose" even if you defeat Fontaine. Maybe that's a too little to black and white of an ending to make a perfect story, but it still uses a bit of morality to give you one last "surprise" after you think you've won.

No, I don't believe Bioshock fails at the end of the story because of this. I think its a letdown more to gameplay because the final boss battle with Fontaine feels ordinary, like it should have been more impactful. Most things leading up to the final battle were interesting, but the final battle felt they said "Oh, wait, this is still a game... lets give them that usual final boss battle." That was my biggest letdown with Bioshock, not the story.

I do realize the article was meant to be about gaming in general, so sorry for the post specifically about one example.

 

[IvoryTowerGamer]

I hate to sound so negative, but isn't the article's entire point undermined by the amount of literary acclaim Waiting for Godot has received despite the fact that the characters never change? If video games are "only" as deep as Beckett's play then I'd say they're actually doing pretty well.

 

[The Random One]

I hate to sound so negative, but isn't the article's entire point undermined by the amount of literary acclaim Waiting for Godot has received despite the fact that the characters never change? If video games are "only" as deep as Beckett's play then I'd say they're actually doing pretty well.

What? No, Waiting does it deliberately. It's essentially a commentary on idleness. If you ended up writing Waiting while trying to write a 'regular' play you'd have failed.

For me, the whole purpose of games is my intent, not what the author wants, and that is the joy creating my own experience and not having to live out someone else's moral lesson.

You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means and I find your repeated usage of it fascinating.

You appear to hold that a 'moral' lesson is a bad thing. But really, any kind of change that a character goes through is 'moral'. Even if it was one that was to be looked down upon by society, like say if the Hero started out kind and friendly and realized midway through he was a sucker and became too cool for school. It's still a 'moral' lesson, because whenever one writes a story, even if it's not what one intends to do, one ends up imparting one's moral compass upon it. Even if your story is about someone who has a moral compass entirely different from yours, and your climax is how that someone ends up having an even more different moral compass, then your story ends up being either a) an exploriation of an alternative you, secretly or no, wished you had internalized, even if out of morbid curiosity, or b) a dark or cyinical ending that while great for the character is supposed to be unsettling for the viewer. I am genuinely curious as to whether when you contest the concept of 'moral' lessons you mean them in the traditional sense - in the fable sense of 'see what happened to this guy, this means you should act in this socially accepted way or bad things will happen' - or in a general, 'this happens to this character because this is what I think about the world' way. That is, if you would protest it even if it was pushing something you'd agree it, presumably out of a desire for games to be completely neutral.

As for your broader argument, I see your point. There's a big divide between the 'make your own story' kind of game and the 'experience this great story from the shoes of the main charater' kind of game. It seems you favour the first kind, which is great - it's probably the point that has more room to grow and show what videogames are really capable of, greatly because of how little explored it is. But these arguments still stand if you're trying to make a narrative-centric videogame.

 

[brinvixen]

Very interesting article. If I may throw out a character that I thought had a strong development over the course of the game was Kratos in God of War 1. I mean, here's a man, who is clearly defined as an embodiment of rage, but as the story goes on, we find that his rage is simply his defense mechanism from the madness that haunts him from (SPOILER) murdering his family. He is, in fact, a man desperate for forgiveness so that he can no longer be tormented by his nightmares -- so desperate that he is willing to destroy any and all in his path to that goal. And (SPOILER) after his climatic battle with Ares, when he finally thinks that the gods will free him and the madness will end, they tell him that he's doomed to have these nightmares forever. And then Kratos, the character that we as the player have been using to murder just about everything in our path, the man who embodies rage and employs cold-blooded murder, becomes helpless, pathetic, and (SPOILER) throws himself from a cliff in attempted suicide: the only way he believes he can escape the madness.

Of course, God of War 2 and 3 didn't capture much of this, and it was mostly just the "death personified" part, but I think GOW1 really caught a glimpse of something special in fleshing out Kratos.

 

[Philius Lupae]

You appear to hold that a 'moral' lesson is a bad thing. But really, any kind of change that a character goes through is 'moral'. Even if it was one that was to be looked down upon by society, like say if the Hero started out kind and friendly and realized midway through he was a sucker and became too cool for school. It's still a 'moral' lesson, because whenever one writes a story, even if it's not what one intends to do, one ends up imparting one's moral compass upon it. Even if your story is about someone who has a moral compass entirely different from yours, and your climax is how that someone ends up having an even more different moral compass, then your story ends up being either a) an exploriation of an alternative you, secretly or no, wished you had internalized, even if out of morbid curiosity, or b) a dark or cyinical ending that while great for the character is supposed to be unsettling for the viewer. I am genuinely curious as to whether when you contest the concept of 'moral' lessons you mean them in the traditional sense - in the fable sense of 'see what happened to this guy, this means you should act in this socially accepted way or bad things will happen' - or in a general, 'this happens to this character because this is what I think about the world' way. That is, if you would protest it even if it was pushing something you'd agree it, presumably out of a desire for games to be completely neutral.

This is very true. It saddens me how many gamers are resistant to storytelling in games because they have a knee-jerk reaction and think any story that explores morals or character development must be "jamming a moral lesson down your throat," or that telling a story like this must be done at the cost of fun.

Games that are "just shooting baddies" e.g. Call of Duty can be entertaining, but I wouldn't want that to be the extent of my gaming experience. I want something more than that--I want something that makes me think, and makes me feel.

 

[Dastardly]

The Story Sucks

Videogame heroes routinely save the universe, win wars, and crush their enemies, but they seem particularly reluctant to experience any kind of internal change.

Read Full Article

A great article, whose position applies to far more than video games. It's exactly what makes sit-coms pretty damn bad. Main characters that never learn, grow, or change.

I do think I can see a rational reason writers may avoid this with video games: Audiences hate to be challenged. Why do more people go see movies about farts before they'll see a movie that deals with racism? Why do people enjoy reality TV in which people behave like total jackasses? Because they don't want to be challenged. They want to be distracted. They want cut-and-dry issues--farts are funny, those guys on Cops are worse people than you--that allow them to feel good about their own faults.

Video game heroes allow people to play out power fantasies. "If I had a superpower, I'd fix the whole world," kind of stuff. Playing as the hero lets them indulge that, imposing their will on this imaginary world without having to wrestle with whether that vision of right/wrong is the best one for that world.

If the hero has to grow and learn, it means the audience has to ask questions about why they were rooting for the hero to begin with. If the hero had something to learn, does that mean they do, too? If the hero was wrong about how to fix the world, could it be the answer isn't as simple as we thought? That connection to the hero is exactly what good stories exploit to emotionally stir an audience: connect you to the hero, then challenge and change the hero, and in doing so spur challenge/change in you. Or at least a strong emotional reaction.

Games are afraid to take that risk, for the same reason TV shows and movies are (and books aren't). Money. Games, shows, and movies are expensive to make--but also, their producers expect an increasingly unrealistic rate of return on that investment. They don't just want to make a killing. They want to make a killing on day one. If you challenge an audience, some of them might not "pass," and they might not come back. The $60 price lock on games can't abide that kind of risk.

Same goes for potentially great shows cancelled because their ratings were good... but not good enough. "We weren't doubling our money every 15 minutes, so we're going to put something cheaper to make in the same slot."

This is what happens when art becomes entwined with money. We just notice it more on electronic entertainment because production costs are higher.

 

[Slashe]

While it may apply to most games, there ARE many games other there with characters that change. Except I don't really call it "change" as more of "character development" because change might result in a character becoming someone they are not (or act out-of-character) while development is more about the character growing.

Off the top of my head, I distinctly recall KOTR having this in Bastila, in BG2 u could romance and change the drow party member (from chaotic to neutral). And replaying it now... Final Fantasy 9 have great characters which grow and learn and mature.

TLDR version (<6 int ver): Change not always good. Growth better. Got games with growth/change. Go see KOTR,BG2,FF9

 

[Zom-B]

The Story Sucks

Videogame heroes routinely save the universe, win wars, and crush their enemies, but they seem particularly reluctant to experience any kind of internal change.

Read Full Article

I took two things away from this interesting little article, the first being that here's another person, another writer, another critic bashing video games for not being books or movies. Video games are still in their infancy, essentially, and while game developers should be able to take the lessons learned from other media, they haven't yet figured out how to implement those lessons well yet.

The second thing that struck me about this article is that it seems to say that there aren't any shitty movies or books. I bet if someone crunched the numbers we'd probably see that the ratio of shitty movies and books to good movies and books vs. shitty games vs. good games would probably be about the same. I'd actually hazard a guess that simply because there are so many more books published and movies released every year that in fact, those forms of entertainment probably suffer far more poorly written and told stories with lamer, less developed characters than do video games. Actually, I'll amend that; Video games probably do have far less fully realized characters, yet I'm sure there are still more terrible movies and books, statistically speaking.

Regardless, many video game characters are not seen as an "entity" per se, but instead as avatars of the player. The player is supposed to go through the growth and character change and Resurrection, not necessarily the video game character.

I don't really like the same criteria applied to literature and film applied to video games, simply because of the interactive nature of games. Granted, a story can still be told, but it actually requires some sort of input from the player and is not strictly a straight line narrative following a character's growth.

 

[hecticpicnic]

Damn it would people stop referencing post-modern writes just to be intellectual.Next movie-bob is gonna be comparing super Mario to Finnegan's Wake.

 

[Catchy Slogan]

While you were talking about the 'Resurrection' part, I couldn't help but be reminded of Luke Fon Fabre from Tales of the Abyss.

EDIT: Also when you were talking about Bioshock, I couldn't help but remember my favourite ending from Bioshock 2.

Spoiler

Where you can sacrifice yourself. The ending I got had her sounding confused and savind Sofia Lamb. I was kind of horrified, that I was having this effect on Elaenor.

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

Damn it would people stop referencing post-modern writes just to be intellectual.Next movie-bob is gonna be comparing super Mario to Finnegan's Wake.

Why can't we get rid of post modernism period? It's fucking useless. Sure, we all build our own narratives of life, so what? It's still absurd to think that there are multiple realities for each person's perspectives. We might not ever know the nature of absolute reality as it is in-itself, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. None of post modernism's ideas are novel, they're all just pessimistic bastardizations of older, better thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche. And the cultural nonsense that has arisen from the philosophy is largely a bunch of pessimistic douchebaggery.

 

[hecticpicnic]

Damn it would people stop referencing post-modern writes just to be intellectual.Next movie-bob is gonna be comparing super Mario to Finnegan's Wake.

Why can't we get rid of post modernism period? It's fucking useless. Sure, we all build our own narratives of life, so what? It's still absurd to think that there are multiple realities for each person's perspectives. We might not ever know the nature of absolute reality as it is in-itself, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. None of post modernism's ideas are novel, they're all just pessimistic bastardizations of older, better thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche. And the cultural nonsense that has arisen from the philosophy is largely a bunch of pessimistic douchebaggery.

I as just making a funny and i assume you were to.I actually like most modern writers Joyce be cause he's Irish and i'm just a proud fucking asshole like that.And Borges he's the man.hat i don't like is modernism(except Kafka he's also the man).Although i do agree with you on the pessimism thing i had to watch Beckett's endgame this year, and god it was just..aweful.I mean it wasn't an aweful play it was just aweful to watch.I do like off topic conversations,lets start another one...What type of music do you like?

 

[tgbennett30]

In a thread discussing storylines and character development, no one has yet mentioned Planescape: Torment?

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

Damn it would people stop referencing post-modern writes just to be intellectual.Next movie-bob is gonna be comparing super Mario to Finnegan's Wake.

Why can't we get rid of post modernism period? It's fucking useless. Sure, we all build our own narratives of life, so what? It's still absurd to think that there are multiple realities for each person's perspectives. We might not ever know the nature of absolute reality as it is in-itself, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. None of post modernism's ideas are novel, they're all just pessimistic bastardizations of older, better thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche. And the cultural nonsense that has arisen from the philosophy is largely a bunch of pessimistic douchebaggery.

I as just making a funny and i assume you were to.I actually like most modern writers Joyce be cause he's Irish and i'm just a proud fucking asshole like that.And Borges he's the man.hat i don't like is modernism(except Kafka he's also the man).Although i do agree with you on the pessimism thing i had to watch Beckett's endgame this year, and god it was just..aweful.I mean it wasn't an aweful play it was just aweful to watch.I do like off topic conversations,lets start another one...What type of music do you like?

Depends on my mood. Tool is #1 though. NIN is up there. I'm going to go see A Perfect Circle in a couple of months so I'm psyched about that. But I also like most classic rock, Zeppelin, The Who, or 70's rock, Eagles and all that. Or Franz Ferdinand, or the Dandy Warhols, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Metallica, or Creedence Clearwater Revival. Like I said, depends on my mood. I'm just not into pop or country. I don't actively pursue rap or hip hop but some of it is alright, as is what I consider dance music, techno, dub step, dance-hip hop, what have you, but that's more for dancing than listening to.

 

[Cursed Frogurt]

Braid had a great Resurrection moment for Tim but also had a crazy realization moment for the player too that I'm afraid too many people overlooked.

Hint: A braid of hair also looks like a bomb fuse.

 

[hecticpicnic]

Damn it would people stop referencing post-modern writes just to be intellectual.Next movie-bob is gonna be comparing super Mario to Finnegan's Wake.

Why can't we get rid of post modernism period? It's fucking useless. Sure, we all build our own narratives of life, so what? It's still absurd to think that there are multiple realities for each person's perspectives. We might not ever know the nature of absolute reality as it is in-itself, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. None of post modernism's ideas are novel, they're all just pessimistic bastardizations of older, better thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche. And the cultural nonsense that has arisen from the philosophy is largely a bunch of pessimistic douchebaggery.

I as just making a funny and i assume you were to.I actually like most modern writers Joyce be cause he's Irish and i'm just a proud fucking asshole like that.And Borges he's the man.hat i don't like is modernism(except Kafka he's also the man).Although i do agree with you on the pessimism thing i had to watch Beckett's endgame this year, and god it was just..aweful.I mean it wasn't an aweful play it was just aweful to watch.I do like off topic conversations,lets start another one...What type of music do you like?

Depends on my mood. Tool is #1 though. NIN is up there. I'm going to go see A Perfect Circle in a couple of months so I'm psyched about that. But I also like most classic rock, Zeppelin, The Who, or 70's rock, Eagles and all that. Or Franz Ferdinand, or the Dandy Warhols, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Metallica, or Creedence Clearwater Revival. Like I said, depends on my mood. I'm just not into pop or country. I don't actively pursue rap or hip hop but some of it is alright, as is what I consider dance music, techno, dub step, dance-hip hop, what have you, but that's more for dancing than listening to.

I used to be into that kinda stuff.I started loving metal and then complex stuff like tool and prog rock.And then one summer i got really into ska,and my tastes just exploded from there, punk(the good stuff, not a fan of hardcore) swing ,prog rock and anything with a cheesey drum machine that's not pretending to be a real drum(as you said it depends on mood).I'm really picky when it comes to my electronic music but i do like it.If i had a band though i'd probably play psychedelic jam jazz rock stuff ,and if i had a proper music studio i'd probably make trip-hop like protished or massive attack.