Does anyone else find "plot twists" in games gimmicky?

[veloper]

Stories in games are usually shit.
That's well before plot twists even come into it. Shitty writing is shit.

 

[CityofTreez]

I agree, plot twists are just a gimmick and they are generally used to hide weak gameplay. Good games don't rely on the story narrative to carry the experience and people who think they do aren't really into games but more into stories. Goto the library or watch a film if you care about story, play a game if you want to be challenged on your skills!

That's a terrible way of thinking. For one, not every game needs to be the same. Gameplay isn't always > story, nor is story always > gameplay. We needs games that put more of an emphasis on an intelligent story, and this thought process of "If you want story, go read a book!" is only holding the medium back.

Games that focus only on gameplay are fine (Serious Sam) and games focus on pure story are fine as well (Heavy Rain, Walking Dead) Then there are games that try and mostly succeed to mix the two (Bioshock, Deus Ex). I'm tired of this ridiculous argument that this medium is so bad that we're afraid of trying to reach a point where we can mix both together.

Video games have the ability to enhance a story that other mediums do not. We need to take advantage of that, and not stay back in the old way of thinking that games shouldn't try to have a great story and narrative.

 

[SecondPrize]

I dunno. I like them when I like them but some series are starting to feel a little M. Night Shamalany.

 

[Greni]

[A bunch of excrement]

This guy is to trolls what pre-teens are to gays. He's "just confused".


OT: Plot twists can be truly remarkable, but nowadays it has become expected, and that's annoying. Subverting a plot twist will be the next cool thing.

'Yer a victim of domestic abuse, Harry. This dream world of wizards is your happy place.'

 

[Agayek]

If you've been playing games for over 2 decades then you know that games didn't really bother with stories back in the day, it was all out gameplay with barely anything else. You might also have noticed that since stories have become more prevalent in games, the difficulty has also dropped to such a point that any fool can finish 90% of games without really having any problems. I know there are more reasons to the decline in difficulty than just story but i do think it factors into it at some level.

When i started gaming it was an intro screen and an ending screen and sometimes a screen or 2 inbetween and the rest was pure gameplay. The story wasn't irrelevant because it wasn't even present. You had a game title to go on and that was it. That was the gaming industry that i joined and helped to make popular when barely anyone was interested in gaming at all. Jump forward 25 years and we are discussing plot twists and storyline like they even remotely add anything to the gameplay, the core element of gaming. All we need now is some comments on graphics and we are basically talking about interactive movies rather than games.

There's a few problems with what you're suggesting.

1) Difficulty level has little-to-nothing to do with incorporating story. The level of difficulty is a side effect of gaming becoming more popular. The creators want to make more money, so they want to appeal to as wide a base as possible. Games like Battletoads are not conducive to that, as the average person who picked up and played it would get incredibly frustrated in minutes and return it, losing them their sale.

As a consequence of such, the average difficulty in games has gone down so that the average person will finish and, more importantly, keep it.

2) Story adds quite a bit to gameplay. Not to the actual mechanics, but to the player. It gives context, which can take a good experience and make it richer, or a bad experience and make it palatable. It gives you a reason to play, and to continue playing, that actually has substance beyond "herpaderp I gots da hi scur!". It also allows games to move away from the aforementioned scoring mechanic and use some more nuanced gameplay that doesn't need to be constantly graded and scored.

Story is not necessary by any means, and a good game is still good without it, but it can and does very frequently make the experience significantly better.

 

[Bobic]

I'd like to think storytelling has advanced somewhat in the past 2500 years, and maybe not doing something just because the ancient greeks didn't do it is nonsensical. Old =/= good etc.

Anyway, as others have said, when used right, they are absolutely brilliant. When used badly they're quite annoying, or even unintentionally hilarious (I'm looking at you, Bionic Commando reboot). The lesson here isn't to not use them, it's to learn to use them properly, which also applies to every other literary device available, funnily enough.

 

[Rariow]

Look at Star Wars. "No, I am your father", is the single most famous line from that entire universe (I guess some could argue "Use the force, Luke", but at any rate you have to admit it's up there). That's for a reason. Twists can work, or they can not. It's that simple.

Example of a game twist that works phenomenally:
KotOR. I'd say that twist's the biggest single reason it's so fondly remembered today.

Example of a game twist that works really badly:
Mass Effect 3. Wait, the Reapers are... and the kid? Because... WHAT?!

A twist is a narrative device like any other. It's not the device that's flawed, it's the user that is. Maybe one could argue that twists have become overused to the point of irrelevance (I'd still disagree, because most games aren't based enough around story to HAVE twists), but I sure as hell wouldn't call them a bad device, or one games should stop using all together.

It's kind of funny--people bash a company like Nintendo for supposedly "reusing" the same plots over and over, when the reality is that 1) this strategy has a lot of antecedents in literature and mythology, and 2) it's a far more nuanced way of telling a story than to create a dark, 'edgy' narrative rife with mediocre dialogue and predicated on tawdry narrative twists to keep the audience involved.

So what you're saying is that Mario having to rescue Peach from being captured for the fifteen millionth time is involving for the audience? I see what you're getting at, but I really don't think Nintendo's the best example here, at all. Maybe Zelda's kinda interesting on occasion, but besides that all their plots stopped being interesting somewhere around the SNES era.

 

[DarkRyter]

All good stories have twists.

If everything happens as you expect it to happen, what's the point?

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

Well I mean for a while every single game was "theres a good guy who tells you to do something for him and then at the end of the game when you do, hes the bad guy"

I don't necessarily like plot twists but rather I like when a plot is new and interesting. A plot twist is just the most abrupt way to do something unexpected. A plot can be a slow burn or an unfolding narrative that's new and interesting without plot twists. Though I will say a well written and executed plot twist is always awesome.

 

[Trueflame]

I don't know what you mean by "plot twist" in the sense you're using it. It sounds to me like you're talking about including plot twists just for the sake of having plot twists, in which case I agree with you. Otherwise though, a story is an organic thing, it just has to develop and flow naturally. That could mean plot twists, that could mean no plot twists, it could mean that you see the ending from ten miles away and the source of tension is you wishing the characters could avoid it (as in tragedy), or from you guessing what could happen next. Some things work better in combination with other things, but all of it is useful, all of it has its own place.

In my opinion, the best plot twists are things that change the meaning of everything that has been happening. For instance, you play a game, read a book, watch a movie, and then near the end everything gets turned on its head, what you thought was good has actually been evil, black is white, and so on, that type of thing. I think there's plenty of room in video games for that sort of thing, or any manner of plot twist. I'm sure problems would come up with there were plot twists after plot twists, but the same goes for just about anything.

 

[Robot Number V]

I agree, plot twists are just a gimmick and they are generally used to hide weak gameplay. Good games don't rely on the story narrative to carry the experience and people who think they do aren't really into games but more into stories. Goto the library or watch a film if you care about story, play a game if you want to be challenged on your skills!

That's insane. First of all, there is absolutely no reason to think that games can either have a good story OR good gameplay. Plenty of games have both. Now, I will admit that plenty of games DO sacrifice gameplay for story, which brings me to my second point: That's not inherently bad. Take The Walking Dead Game. Great story, pretty shitty gameplay. But you know what? I still ENJOYED it. That doesn't mean they used the "gimmick" of a good story to trick me into playing their crappy game, I was just willing to put up with a shitty aspect of the game because I liked a GOOD aspect of the game. Just like if someone is willing to put up with Far Cry 3's shit-tastic writing because the game is so damn fun. I certainly was. Story and gameplay are equally valuable aspects of any given game. Which one you value more highly just comes down to personal preference. And it's not like you have to pick one: Like I said, I enjoy both The Walking Dead Game AND Far Cry 3, but for different reasons.



Games where story is more important then gameplay aren't automatically bad, much less WORSE then games where the reverse is true. They're just different kinds of games.

 

[szaleniec1000]

Plot twists are awesome when they make you feel like a moron.

To expand, plot twists are ace when the seeds for them have been laid out throughout a story. At the moment when the twist is revealed you suddenly realize the signs have been there all along and you've just been to stupid to notice them. That's good story telling.

The only example which springs to mind is the 'would you kindly' part of Bioshock. All the way though that game i was thinking "Why am i doing what some douchebag with a radio i dont know is telling me? Meh whatever GAME LOGIC!" Then you get the flashback at the end of every time the guy (forget his name, its been a while) says "would you kindly?" before he 'asks' you to do something. It all just clicks into place, its a twist, but its a twist which the game has been building to and planting the seeds for, for the entire play experience. THAT is a good twist.

Having 'revelations' with no prior buildup? Yeh, that's rubbish story telling to me.

Got it in one. The difference between a good twist and a bad twist is the difference between "I never saw that coming" and "I couldn't possibly have seen that coming". The key is to build logically on what you've established throughout the story, but to do so in a way that's not so obvious that everyone knows exactly what's about to happen.

 

[Callate]

We live in a very, very different space with regard to entertainment media than the ancient Greeks. Or the middle class of Elizabethan England, for that matter. The typical five-year-old American child has been exposed to more dramatic works than someone of those eras would have seen in their entire lifetime. It's not surprising that the desire to "up-end" the expectations of conventional dramatic structures is somewhat in vogue right now.

Like most dramatic choices, it can be done well or it can be done badly. We're getting to the point where we're so jaded we've begun to second-guess plot lines and predict plot twists that are meant to be surprising. I think the important thing is that such twists still make sense, that they follow from real connections to what exists within the over-arching plot rather than simply saying that everything that came before can be tossed into the air for the mere sake of surprising the audience (see the much-used, and frequently despised "it was all a dream" cliche.)

 

[CplDustov]

I actually didn't like BioShock's narrative--I thought it was tacky to make you listen to a giant segmented audio book, and that the plot twist was hokey. Also, it was just a pared down version of System Shock 2 or Deus Ex gameplay-wise, but that's a whole other post...

Wouldn't that more be an issue with the method of delivery rather than the narrative itself? I totally agree with what you say even though I enjoy that type of narrative delivery but your point is a good one.

For Bioshock I would say however that two plots are going on each with their own twist.
The audiolog leads up to the discovery that

Spoiler

you are Andrew Ryan's son

and the main game interactions with Atlas lead to the discovery that

Spoiler

above and beyond that you are a sleeper agent so deep he doesn't realise it and has a set of trigger words.

OT: I agree with others that twists are a tool and can be used well but must derive from the narrative and characters to avoid Starbrat Syndrome and that story and any twists must be married with the gameplay.

 

[Lightknight]

Gimmick is a fairly broad term but I'm not sure it can be applied here. A gimmick is any kind of trick or device used to gain attention, publicity or business. Gimmicks are also not inherently bad. One time while I was at a stop light a homeless guy on the side of the road got up and started dancing in a sort of river-dance style. I gave him what cash I had on me. Because I was entertained.

If you think about it, anything from a price cut on a product to a press release is a gimmick. The Wiimote was indeed a gimmick but damned if it wasn't a successful one that changed the console peripheral market for the better.

But I don't know if you can think of the plot as a gimmick. That'd be like saying that it's a gimmick when sour patch kids turn from sour to sweet. It's more like the product they're selling.

 

[Product Placement]

Gonna quote-mine the fuck out of you, so apologies in advance.

I'm talking Spectrum ZX81 and Commodore 64 era of gaming.

So your best examples of eras when games didn't need stories are from periods when technical limitations were the biggest constraint on game makers of the time.

I'm sorry, but that's allot like looking at movies from the early days of film making and comparing them to modern day flicks.
In fact, let's try that now:

(for added effects, you can have someone play a piano in the background)​

Oh, man. Why don't they make films like these anymore, instead of focusing on silly stuff like dialog? Btw, that was an actual complaint made back then. ("Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" - Harry Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927)

But i suppose my main core argument in this:

If you remove all the story from a game, what are you left with? A game
If you remove all gameplay from a game, what are you left with? A story

You know, the same thing can actually be applied to both movies and books. Neither don't have to contain a story to be called a book or a movie. What else are you gonna call a landscape book or a nature life documentary, for example? Stories are not what define games, books nor movies but rather the three can be used as a medium to tell a story.

So with that, I argue that your main core argument is flawed.

As for the original topic; are plot twists a gimmick? Well, it depends. Is it essential to the plot or is it painfully obvious that it was put there just to shock people. How well was it executed? Provide no buildup and the surprise feels forced. Give too much away, too early and everyone's figured it out long before the actual reveal. Plot twists are one of the hardest narrative tools to implement properly so for anyone serious in writing, it should only be included in stories that need it.

Games can make it even more difficult. Are you gonna allow players to explore? Consider the last Deus Ex game. It included multiple twists to be discovered along the way but most people who decided to snoop around and hack computers, were given waaay too many pieces to put together. So when Jensen is told about the big gasp, he lets out a big gasp, despite being with us, every step of the way through the various vents and terminals.

So yeah, poorly implemented twists do devalue them. Hack writers that feel they need to have one "because everyone's doing it!" do devalue them.

But when they work, they work. And boy, can they work.

Spoiler: I leave you with a massive spoiler from a game made during what I consider the Golden age of Bioware. Don't click it if you haven't played that game (you know which game this is).

 

[EzraPound]

All good stories have twists.

If everything happens as you expect it to happen, what's the point?

Um, the actual experience of seeing it get there? A "twist" implies a jarring change--narratives don't have to have them to be good.

I actually didn't like BioShock's narrative--I thought it was tacky to make you listen to a giant segmented audio book, and that the plot twist was hokey. Also, it was just a pared down version of System Shock 2 or Deus Ex gameplay-wise, but that's a whole other post...

Wouldn't that more be an issue with the method of delivery rather than the narrative itself? I totally agree with what you say even though I enjoy that type of narrative delivery but your point is a good one.

For Bioshock I would say however that two plots are going on each with their own twist.
The audiolog leads up to the discovery that

Spoiler

you are Andrew Ryan's son

and the main game interactions with Atlas lead to the discovery that

Spoiler

above and beyond that you are a sleeper agent so deep he doesn't realise it and has a set of trigger words.

OT: I agree with others that twists are a tool and can be used well but must derive from the narrative and characters to avoid Starbrat Syndrome and that story and any twists must be married with the gameplay.

You're right, but the delivery just totally took me out of the storyline. They might as well have just made a shooter without a story and included a pocket novel.

We live in a very, very different space with regard to entertainment media than the ancient Greeks. Or the middle class of Elizabethan England, for that matter. The typical five-year-old American child has been exposed to more dramatic works than someone of those eras would have seen in their entire lifetime. It's not surprising that the desire to "up-end" the expectations of conventional dramatic structures is somewhat in vogue right now.

Like most dramatic choices, it can be done well or it can be done badly. We're getting to the point where we're so jaded we've begun to second-guess plot lines and predict plot twists that are meant to be surprising. I think the important thing is that such twists still make sense, that they follow from real connections to what exists within the over-arching plot rather than simply saying that everything that came before can be tossed into the air for the mere sake of surprising the audience (see the much-used, and frequently despised "it was all a dream" cliche.)

...Except that plot twists are hardly a "new" idea--they become more and more prominent as literature becomes more and more commercial; an ongoing trend since the publication of Defoe's Crusoe or earlier.

I'd like to think storytelling has advanced somewhat in the past 2500 years, and maybe not doing something just because the ancient greeks didn't do it is nonsensical. Old =/= good etc.

Anyway, as others have said, when used right, they are absolutely brilliant. When used badly they're quite annoying, or even unintentionally hilarious (I'm looking at you, Bionic Commando reboot). The lesson here isn't to not use them, it's to learn to use them properly, which also applies to every other literary device available, funnily enough.

LOL yeah because game storytelling represents an "advancement" over the likes of Sophocles or Euripides.

As many others before me have already stated, plot twists are simply a storytelling tool. They are not inherently good or bad- it depends on how they are implemented into the narrative as a whole.

One of my personal philosophies regarding plot twists is that a plot twist can only be considered truly great if the story and twist hold up when the plot twist has already been spoiled, or you are experiencing said story for a second time. If you still feel power in the moment of the twist, if you still feel like a specific narrative point has been made, then the twist has been a success, as it is a part of the story being told, not the entire story. If the story now feels "ruined" because you had a plot twist spoiled, it is quite likely that the story was being held up by the twist, and without it, it doesn't have a leg to stand on.

To be clear, I'm not advocating the stance that all spoilers are okay. I hate having a twist spoiled just as much as the next person (Using recent examples, although I think both of these narratives have great twists that hold up even when already known, I can tell you that if Bioshock Infinite and Iron Man 3 had been spoiled for me beforehand, I would have been quite unhappy). However, good twists hold up regardless of whether you know them in advance or not, as that means that they have something to say about the characters and narrative at play. The twist is more than just a narrative "gotcha!" moment- the twist causes you to reevaluate the story as a whole and learn something important about the nature of the characters or the points the story is trying to make. I had "would you kindly?" spoiled for me LONG before I first played Bioshock, but I still felt the power in the Andrew Ryan scene. I understood the points it was making about free will and game narrative, and the moment (in addition to the rest of the story) held up regardless of the fact that I knew it beforehand. Contrast that to latter-day M. Night Shyamalan films and similar things- if a story is "ruined" by spoilers, chances are good that it wasn't that great of a story to begin with.

A good narrative needs to have stronger foundations than simply surprising the audience.

I agree that they're not always bad, but I still think they're *mostly* bad--a really good writer wouldn't need to use plot twists to create an affecting story, so whenever you're using one it's a cop-out, in a sense.

Your post sounds exquisitely smug. Could you provide some examples of what specific twists you've seen people raving about?

And yes, plot twists can greatly enhance a gaming experience. Not from a purely gameplay perspective, but they can surprise and make you more engaged with the story, thus increasing immersion and making you enjoy the game more.

Plot twists can also be a cheap way to tell a story, if they're cliched, predictable plot twists, like "Oh my gosh, the leader turned out to be evil". What I think you're implying is that twists made purely for the sake of there being a plot twists are cheap, but twists that are central to the story and fit the context of the narrative and characters are good.

It's kind of funny--people bash a company like Nintendo for supposedly "reusing" the same plots over and over, when the reality is that 1) this strategy has a lot of antecedents in literature and mythology, and 2) it's a far more nuanced way of telling a story than to create a dark, 'edgy' narrative rife with mediocre dialogue and predicated on tawdry narrative twists to keep the audience involved. No one's going to confuse Mario for a narrative-driven game, but take Majora's Mask... the narrative is way beyond something like Heavy Rain in terms of nuance and sophistication.

Wait... what? There being a plot twist in the story makes you as bad a recycler of material as Nintendo? And you're saying that The Sixth Sense, Bioshock, Wreck-it Ralph or any other piece of fiction with a big central twist can't be as nuanced as stories without them? Get your head out of your ass already.

Um, Wreck-It Ralph is an average-quality animated film, The Sixth Sense is a potboiler Bruce Willis film that nevertheless manages to be somewhat enjoyable, and BioShock features generally awful writing and would be completely unremarkable were it not a video game (because video game narratives are hot garbage). By contrast, I would argue that Nintendo's best work represents a tangible contribution to twentieth-century artistic culture--maybe in the vein of Snow White or Fantasia--though I realize the jury's still out on that...

Anyway, I'm not arguing that EVERY Nintendo storyline is good. My point was just that their use of tropes is defensible from a classical standpoint, and when they really do try--I cited Majora's Mask--they tower over a lot of the competition in terms of nuance and sophistication. Hell, few will admit it, but Pokémon was an ingenious narrative, in a sense...

 

[DarkRyter]

All good stories have twists.

If everything happens as you expect it to happen, what's the point?

Um, the actual experience of seeing it get there? A "twist" implies a jarring change--narratives don't have to have them to be good.

But narratives are based on twists. "John went to the store. John went home." isn't a story, or at the very least it isn't a good one.

Abused orphans aren't wizards. Cities can't exist underwater. Presidents aren't burglars. Chemistry teachers don't make meth. But that's where the story is. You don't know what happens, and when you experience the story, you find out.

 

[rasputin0009]

Plot twists are usually just bad writing in general, not just games. Take a look at the Fast and the Furious franchise. It's nothing but plot twists because the story is just a vehicle for the cars going fast and explosions going boom. And that's okay because it's still fun to watch.

And you can say that about games. Not every game has to have a compelling story, if it has some fun gameplay to back it up. But if it's a story-driven game like Heavy Rain, then yes, it should have an awesome story. And without plot twists. Because plot twists are cheap writing.

My opinion of Heavy Rain was that it sucked. Shitty, shitty story. But I guess you really can't expect much from something that more or less copied choose-your-own-adventure books.

 

[DoPo]

All good stories have twists.

If everything happens as you expect it to happen, what's the point?

Um, the actual experience of seeing it get there? A "twist" implies a jarring change--narratives don't have to have them to be good.

But narratives are based on twists. "John went to the store. John went home." isn't a story, or at the very least it isn't a good one.

Abused orphans aren't wizards. Cities can't exist underwater. Presidents aren't burglars. Chemistry teachers don't make meth. But that's where the story is. You don't know what happens, and when you experience the story, you find out.

All those...aren't plot twists, though. You can have surprising events without them being plot twists. Good guy is chasing bad guy, bad guy is doing stuff to try and stop the good guy - that's not a plot twist, the bad guy escaping or getting captured is also not. I think we've had one or two of these stories and if memory serves correctly, they worked out. Do you really need the bad guy to turn out to be a tomato or the good guy actually finding out he's an alien etc to enjoy the story? Really? No, I don't think so.

Would you mind giving me your definition of a plot twist and maybe some examples? I think what you call "plot twist" is actually plain "plot".