So in accordance with my New Years resolution, I’ve removed all political and news blogs from my news reader — we’re down to all people I know in real life, plus a couple of Internet acquaintances, plus a few more total strangers who are nevertheless chock-full of crunchy awesomeness . This is all well and good in terms of productivity. But right now, the evening after the Iowa caucuses, it’s striking me as a particularly boneheaded move. Go ahead, laugh at the addict pathetically flopping around in the throes of withdrawal; I would love to read what all the chattering chatterheads are chattering about. Must… be… strong!
Anyway, one of the aforementioned strangers who made the cut is Timothy Burke, a professor of History at Swarthmore College (where I spent a semester on exchange back in the mid-90s, an experience that almost certainly saved me from transferring or dropping out). One of Burke’s areas of interest is games and, of course, the history of games. In a recent post, Burke talks about how even the more acclaimed recently-released games offer little in the way of storytelling and open-endedness:
I am more pessimistic about storytelling, however. The truth is that almost none of the current generation of game designers are good storytellers. Even the best of games rarely rise to the level of being proficiently derivative narrative engines. Look at Mass Effect, a game whose storytelling has been widely complimented. The main plot is pretty much a Science Fiction 101 space-operatic mash-up. Galactic civilization, many alien races, ancient progenitors, even more ancient menace which periodically swats down galactic civilization, humanity struggling to claim its place in the stars. It’s more a platform for character development and for interactive participation, which is what the plot mostly needs to be in a game of this type. As such, it’s great. Write it out as a novel and it seems like fairly thin gruel.
And:
The other direction where there could be some kind of evolution in games-for-gamers would be towards more emergent or “sandbox” kinds of gameplay. Designers like to claim that their games already accomodate this kind of design, but that’s largely wrong or misleading most of the time. This is one reason that Assassin’s Creed disappointed a lot of gamers. They expected it to be a very open-ended environment filled with NPCs who had autonomous-agent AI, where the player decided when and how to carry out his objectives. In the end, it was a fairly scripted game with a lot of repetition. Bioshock seems to me to be a good example of where this kind of element is really lacking. It’s set in a huge, interesting world, but the player is riding the amusement-park rails the entire time. Any time you might want to get out and explore, there’s a conveniently impassable obstacle.
These are just snippets from Burke’s piece; it’s worth reading the whole thing to get the entire context. But the basic arguments are the familiar ones, that most game plots are weak and constraining.
I think these familiar arguments are pretty obviously right. Sure, we can point to an exception that really blew us away for one reason or another. Grand Theft Auto, I Have No Mouth And Must Scream, and so on. Burke himself cites Deus Ex. But these sorts of games are few and far between. The gaming experience is not, right now, about superior story or freedom.
At the end, Burke is still optimistic that games could be much more than they are. I am less sanguine. As Burke acknowledges, the reason designers “don’t let their players climb off the amusement park ride and peek behind the scenery” is because it would be hideously expensive to implement.
But there are more worrisome issues than mundane cost concerns. Simply put, I’m not sure our culture knows how to tell the stories that Burke would like us to tell.
I blame Laura J. Mixon for planting this bug in my head. Laura agrees with Burke that games need to have better stories and offer more freedom. Laura is a passionate storyteller, and she firmly believes that professional storytellers are essential for games to really start making progress.
She’s right of course, and yet the core problem is that our storytelling forms are particularly ill-suited for the kinds of innovative games we all want. Short stories, novels, plays, movies — all force you to stay on the rails of the amusement park ride, as Burke puts it. That’s just how we’ve been trained to tell stories for the last few tens of thousands of years. Other than the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, nothing that storytellers produce is anything like what game critics are asking for. (It’s a sad sign that most games praised for their innovative, free-form plots are simply Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, except with far fewer decision points than the paperback versions.)
And no, the answer isn’t “just invent better AI.” I think we know enough about game AIs to populate game worlds with interesting characters. Not novelistically realistic characters, but characters who react to our avatars in interesting ways.
What we don’t know how to do yet is fully unleash those AIs. That is, we can’t populate a town with simple AIs, drop the player in, and let the story evolve. Players want freedom to act, but they also wants to achieve goals, participate in the main plotline, be the hero. How do you make sure that key supporting characters don’t get killed or taken out of the story too early? How do you prevent the game from falling into a state where the player, through no fault of her own, can’t ever win? Or worse, can’t do anything interesting?
I believe that we can’t construct satisfying stories in this manner until we can develop a new breed of storytellers. People who don’t just understand story, but have a deep mathematical understanding of the web of the story’s possibilities, and can tune the myriad AIs accordingly. Not just yarn spinners, but actual story weavers.
In short, we have the computational power, but we don’t quite have the theory — and certainly not the practice. I’m guessing it’ll be twenty to forty years until we get people who are recognizably good at this, fifty to one hundred until they start showing up en masse. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for those people show up, we might as well keep playing around with shaders.
I think you’re totally right, but just to pile some pessimism on your pessimism: how are we going to learn how to tell emergent stories in game environments? Developers seem to have zero interest in playing around with the possibilities, even minimally. At the same time, there’s no toolkit or package for folks who might want to mess around with theory and practice in a more garage-band kind of way. It’s as if after the first few European novels appeared, paper and ink and the printing press had all become too expensive for individual authors to ever hope to use, and the organizations who owned all those things weren’t interested in novels.
I’ve played one or two of those D&D sims. Are you talking about the ones where you have a live dungeonmaster, or the ones that are on autopilot. The latter ones can be neat, but they work by being pretty heavily scripted. And you can feel when things are scripted.
Still, this does point out that it’s all about the toolkits.
This is all over the place.
We as a culture know how to tell a story. You’re with your friends, you’re trying to get the 4 year-old to sleep, you around a campfire, you create an ode to your favorite caffinated beverage. etc. All of those tools translate fairly evenly across to print medium and tools.
The real problem is that there really aren’t useful layers of abstraction between the novel and game engine universes. The toolsets really aren’t there. How do I make agents say interesting/intriguing things without creating dialog trees from hell? How do I make a pool of them act like a group of people in a novel or face to face story? As much as I love the idea of mutli-tier needs-based automonmous agents at my fingertips, what’s out there now can’t create the same evocation of emotion that writers can achieve with say 300-500 hours of work effort.
One of the fundamental issues is that computer games and storytelling entertainment don’t cross at all levels at the moment. This is definitely changing, but overall, as Carmack has said, storytelling in games is pretty much at the same level as plot in porn at the moment. It’s a nice addition, but a majority of the demographic isn’t going to boycott a publisher/developer for being “too on the rails”.
I mean, take a gander at Second Life, it’s about as open ended as you could want, but you’ve only three or four main uses at the moment: novelty (we’ve got a store presence in the metaverse), kink (yay freedom of expression), gambling (throttling down on that at the moment), and promotion (spreading the word about IRL/SL goods and services). Now, I think that there’s a decent argument for the differences of persistent world vs. game, much in the same way I think there’s a decent argument between game and novel.
We’re a social and competitive culture. People like knowing how they compare to the Jones’, how leet their gear is, or how good they are on a scale. We’re also really good at detecting flaws, from audio, visual and emotional perspectives. You just don’t get that with a sandbox title, but can with something that has more structural barriers. When you’re spending 4-12 hours with a novel, but you spend 20-1000+ with a game universe or platform, you start being able to see the flaws.
Part of the problem is what I’d also call the hype factor: each of the named games you listed were subject to months (if not years) of false expections because the publicity hounds and developers tried to make their world sound different/better/bigger than what has come before. B&W, A.Creed and Bioshock were all touted as bringing something hugely novel to the table, when the actual delivered product was neat, but not all it was cracked up to be.
People have to want this change, and really demand it before I see the toolset to start coming around. I think we’re still stuck in the graphics immersion wars for now. Once we can get the real-time physics, lighting and modeling working right, I think there will start to be more tools out there for agent/avatar puppeteering contruction. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a production value magpie. If it’s bright and shiny and neat, I’m first to the plate with it.
I think we’ll see more ARGs, sandbox worlds (Spore, etc.) and step-by-step evolution of existing frameworks before we see the immersive combo title that reacts the way people want. Then again, I’m also working on Project C, but it’s more of a mix between between a novel, game and CYOA. It could thud horrifically, given the nature of experimental game/media types.
Most of these topics are perennial subjects over at: Terra Nova. http://terranova.blogs.com/
*blink* Gosh, I guess I had a little to say. I hope some of it made sense.
I agree with much of what you’ve said (*particularly* your third paragraph). But I’m also trying to say that even if we have really great toolsets, it’s a rare skill to be able to tell satisfying non-linear stories. I think most of our best professional storytellers really have no clue how to do this. It’s not a “normal” kind of story.
The closest we have to this skillset today are gamemasters for pen-and-paper RPGs, or rather, the top 1-2% of those. The kind of people who can go, “Oh, crap — the party is going to do *that*? Well, okay… I can work with this…” Someone who can take any crazy idea the players have and still bring the story around and through a satisfying path. (I was always more of a slay-the-ogre-and-take-his-treasure kind of guy myself. Simple minds, simple pleasures.)
Exactly… that was where I was going with that. Especially after seeing Laura’s storyteller demo, right now you need to be a good written word storyteller, ad hoc plot-crafter and have pretty hard core programming skills at the moment for what I think you’d like to see, and even then, that ignores the huge investment in terms of other art that would be required (sound, modeling, etc.)
The answer is my friend Alec who is dead f’in’ brilliant at stories and works as a game designer for EA starting a few months ago. So our current agenda is: keep corporate realities from squishing Alec. Much simpler agenda. Much less depressing. Aren’t you glad I was here?
Very. I am also proud to share your agenda of opposing Alec-squishing. (I don’t know him personally, but I’m willing to hop on the bandwagon anyway.)
Tad Williams showed himself to be an impressively talented reactive storyteller, when working on Shadowmarch, which shifted directions in response to audience prodding, or the audience guessing what he had planned (such that he went back, rethought previous clues, and came up with different explanations). Though of course, he’s an all-around geek — comics, RPGs, etc. I think working in multiple media probably helps that.
Anyways, I still am just not so pessimistic as others seem to be that games will stay locked into the current battle-of-the-graphics mode. I mean, weren’t people raving about the open-endedness of Shenmue, a couple years back?
A key requirement is the development of a dynamic plot engine — something that can recognize when the player has screwed up in a way that cuts off a major arc of the desired long-term linear or tree-structured story, and pull some events and characters out of a bag of reserve plot elements and drop them into places they’re likely to be found and used to link back into the main network of events… And actually, when I describe it, it really doesn’t sound that hard to build in the context of semi-open RPG/adventure games like Might and Magic VI through VIII, the Wing Commander: Privateer games, Escape Velocity, etc — the distinguishing feature of the games I’m thinking about is that there’s a mix of plot-centric missions and events, and non-plot-centric ones which are optional, or just amusing, or allow the character to grind for XP / Gold / whatever is valuable… and more importantly, this distinction isn’t always obvious, which means the system could drop in plot-centric “bridges” where necessary without the insertion seeming odd.
If you’re talking about something a development company can put together, sure. But if you’re talking about a creative project that one/a few/ small number of people can actually pull off, I don’t think we’re anywhere close at the moment.
One of the major issues is all these games is that they essentially end up looping the creative content that they have.
“Oh, I’ve been on this FedEx quest before”
“I’ve heard this dialog from the background NPCs 857 times already.”
“Oh, another random encounter, wheee. How. so. very. exciting.”
At the other end of the spectrum, I think we’ve been shown this year how much well crafted storytelling can add to a game. Just a few hundred lines of dialog from GladOS and some wall art, and the song of course made Portal into a sleeper hit.
The real issue from my perspective is not to have the games oversold. They can be gems of games if they don’t try too hard. And story can really come out if you don’t end up in a RPG slogfest.
One of the areas that could improve this is the ability to store and kick off dialog for NPCs via text fonts. When we can match the voice font to lip movements, we’ll be 20-30% there.
I’m encouraged, but still pessimistic. No one’s yet created a typerwriter/wordprocessor for writers of game-storytelling yet. I’m not sure what we need to accomplish it, either.