Your Game Stories?
I’m thinking about story in games. Not the linear, Valve will have it solved any day now, Hollywood blazed the trail for us sort of story. Rather, I’m just trying to get a handle on the massive space outside of linear stories.
My first question is: do sandbox games have a story? Do they provide a context, and the player fills in the blanks with his or her imagination? Tycho got me thinking about this:
Eventually, I came to view the criminal element as chores: something my mother might yell from the top of the stairs, to be put off until another time. What I need to do right now, what’s best for the city, is to set up a huge ramp and then jump over the highway in a stolen car. It’s critical that this get done today. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you keep it to yourself. I can lift a garbage truck and I’m immune from prosecution.
Does that “count” as story? How elaborate does your own internal narration get? How elaborate does it have to get, in order to be satisfying in the way a crafted story is? When we (as developers) write crafted stories for games, are we getting in the way of a more satisfying activity the players could be performing on their own? Should we focus on providing context, and then just getting out of the way? Or do we need more than that?
I’d love to hear any player-generated stories, mini-stories, narratives, what have you. Do you make up context and motive while you play? Do you have fond memories of any non-developer-crafted stories?
March 13th, 2007 at 3:56 am
Chores aren’t so bad if you’re motivated to do them.
I’ll use Wasteland as an example, because I love it so much.
Yeah, you could leave the ranger station almost immediately. You could truck straight into Vegas and get your floppy bits handed to you pretty quickly. Or you could go check out the fruit stand and kill some mutant rodents.
The chores weren’t such a big deal because there was some really good dialogue, they weren’t always repetitive nonsense, and you could skip ‘em if you really wanted to (you pays your money, you takes your chances)
On the other side, there was a game like Ultima 7, where you couldn’t leave Trinsic until you’d tooled around the place (and answered the annoying copy protection questions) and forced things to be more linear. Two things even worse about that was that you could tool around any township you wanted, but there were bugs that caused conversations to happen that wouldn’t make any sense at all unless you were sticking to the roughly linear plot. Second, the chores were the worst. May I never move another stack of pumpkins again.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I don’t know that I’ve ever made a good story out of sandbox time, but I have created rather elaborate objectives to challenge myself. By far, I’ve put the most sandbox hours into the recent GTA games - GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, so I’ll share some examples out of those.
First thing that comes to mind is a personal challenge - starting completely unarmed, and without buying weapons, cause enough havok to get 6 stars and steal a tank. It took me many many tries to do this the first time I came up with it. After that, I would come up with variations on those rules. An interesting twist occured in san andreas, where after a certain point I had 2 girlfriends, one that would let me keep weapons coming out of the hospital; and the other out of jail. This essentially ended this challenge game for me as it actually made it difficult to end up with no weapons. I think that the reason I never maxed out SA as I did the other two titles is partially due to this, and some other limitations. I won’t say that I don’t load it up every now and then, though, to fly my harrier around and blow stuff up - cause hey, its fun and where else can I do that?
Another mini-game I made up I call “homicidal taxi driver” - here, I took one of their mini games, driving the taxi around, and to make it more challenging attempted to keep myself at 2 or more stars. I’d find jumps that shouldn’t be jumpable and try them, I’d ramp off of sports cars, drive the wrong way on the highway (this generally ended badly when a truck would spawn).
Cesar and I would also play a “party game” version sometimes, where your turn was to basically get in as much trouble as you could very quickly (say, 3-5 stars), and then accomplish something - hit a jump; steal a swat van, flip a fire truck - there would be these odd secondary objectives we’d just come up with once he had done the last one to our satisfaction.
I will say this - I never created much of a narrative or story of my own for this freeplay time. But personally, I’m not sure that GTA III would have been compeling to me if it just dumped me in the sandbox, and had no missions or secret packages or vehicle collections. It was a great blend of freedom and story for me at the time - I could mess around and explore freely, but at any point that I wanted to progress the main story, there it was with handy indicators to tell me who I could talk to next. Add to that, there was a great amount of discoverable side missions - I was thrilled the first time I hopped in a RC Van and discovered there was some mini side mission to drive RC cars around to blow up specific targets. Or when I found the first list of cars to steal, or got my upgrade for my first 10 secret packages. I suppose my point is, freedom in a sandbox is fun, and I can entertain myself - but developer driven story and content is a necessary hook for me.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I should mention, I’ve had the habit of creating challenges for myself in games for awhile. A friend and I first learned to play SMB3 holding the controller backwards, and after mastering that, while laying upside off the couch. It wasn’t that SMB3 didn’t offer everything I wanted from it (ok, a whole lot more levels with the shoe would have rocked); but the game itself was so fun to watch and to play that I wanted there to be additional challenges after I finished it.
In my opinion, the game that most rewarded me was the original Zelda. The 2nd quest was… wonderful to discover and play through a new set of dungeons, while still largely being the same game play that I found so fun in the first quest. Admittedly, level design costs in the 3D era probably prohibit this level of additional content, but I still love that game for giving me a new and exciting 2nd playthrough.
March 15th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Wow, this is great stuff.
It sounds like some developers are pretty good (consciously or not, as the case may be) at creating contexts for gameplay. GTA is the obvious biggie now, but it’s interesting that you point out those older games– I certainly remember doing some unintended stuff more frequently with those old, lower production value titles. And then Ultima 7, well… yeah, I don’t know why they, philosophically, thought to provide so much interactivity. It clearly worked for that game, though.
It sounds like developers are less good at creating contexts for immersion, or story, or contextualization– just for the player to think, “I’m this kind of dude, I’m doing this for this reason”. I think City of Heroes did a pretty great job in this area, which is surprising to me because it really has no story. The personal investment is a huge component.
Raph Koster has a blog entry up on player immersion from GDC; I might make a post about his post.
Regarding your 2D game design point, Castlevania designer Koji Igarashi has some of the same opinions:
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/13/castlevanias-koji-igarashi-2d-games-will-never-die/
And hell, who can forget friggin’ UPSIDE DOWN CASTLE?
March 15th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I’m always sticking to my point that the world still needs some good side-scroller action (heck, look at Alien Hominid, which has done pretty well for its origins as a flash game) A few of the bonus levels in the Smash Bros. series. New Super Marios Bros. (I’m sticking with games I’ve played, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about Viewtiful Joe)
City of Heroes was excellent in this area. I’ve not been playing in a long time, but I feel like I get a little more sense of achievement by being told “Hey, great profile” by other people more than just doing the level grind. Lots of people hit the level cap. Not everyone got some positive feedback from faceless strangers along the way.
I’d be sad if single-player gaming went away altogether. There’s some really great aspects of finding a solid guild to play with, and there are times when you meet new people and have a lot of fun playing the game with them. Of course, there are also a lot of times where you find a very lousy crowd (”LEEEEEEEROY JENKINS!”), and a lesser aspect that multiplayer games tend to have a subtle commitment aspect. Part of finding a decent group of other players often suggests helping them out with their quests/missions/whatever, and I’ve found myself feeling guilty if I just wanted to do a relatively short session.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Procedurally-generated storylines are coming, I’m certain. The real question is whether the first people to do it will have done it well or poorly; that will affect how quickly it’s pursued on commercial projects.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Who is transiit?!? Another CoH player? Impossible.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
Sure it’ll be done. I ask all these questions because I want to do it.
The other CoH player, btw, is the original Erik….
March 26th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
“The other CoH player, btw, is the original Erik…”
Good lord, how many of us are there?!?