Why can't we do the little things: A thread about videogame stories

[Pogilrup]

How many videogames can do drama with revolving around crime, war, horror, or disaster?

It seems Papers, Please stands alone.

What's wrong with that?

I'll use the example of "The Unbearable lightness of being" by Kundera. That deals with the relationship between two people. The invasion and occupation of the Czech by the Russians is part of the story, but doesn't make it any less valid as something about life.

Ah yes that reminds about "This War of Mine".

But yes you are right the "mundane" isn't really mundane. Still I would love to see more games that place us in the shoes of an ordinary person struggling with ordinary issues.

 

[Malbourne]

But yes you are right the "mundane" isn't really mundane. Still I would love to see more games that place us in the shoes of an ordinary person struggling with ordinary issues.

I could give you another example: Cherry Tree High Comedy Club, where you play a girl trying to recruit some friends in order to pad out the membership of her comedy club. But really, it's part of the larger "slice-of-life" segment of games that can include visual novels or school simulators, all focused on daily events that people can go through. I wouldn't call this genre a frontier of sorts, since it exists, and there will be a market for these games now and in the future.

 

[Lilani]

We have mystery, crime, sci-fi, fantasy, war, dystopia, and sometimes just non-sensical.

But there seems to be one type of one story we have yet to properly express in this medium.

This type of story is the type story you are required to read in your high school literature classes. Examples included The Great Gatsby, My Antonia, The Crucible, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

We have some games that tell of a story of a mundane life revolving around an occupation. Games such as Recettear, Papers, Please, or Harvest Moon.

For games that do try to tell a mundane story, such as Gone Home, gameplay tends to be reduced to point-and-click or a simple platformer.

This medium in its current state can't seem to express the mundane without making it revolve around an occupation or by limiting the gameplay complexity.

I've always thought if the mundane as simple things. Everything in my life that I consider to be mundane is pretty simple: doing the laundry, driving to work, cleaning, etc. If it's complex, it's no longer mundane, or at least that's my experience.

As for why they revolve around occupations, people don't usually force themselves to do mundane things unless they are under some sort of obligation, such as work or life requirements. So I would assume the reason the "smaller mundane" stories revolve around that because it gives the character a reason to be there and stick it out.

 

[Marik2]

Isn't this what some visual novels do already?

 

[DEAD34345]

I don't really get what your point is. Why is this extremely specific type of story so important to represent?

Games can tell stories (obviously), but this isn't enough. Games can tell mundane stories, but that's still not quite good enough. Games can tell mundane stories that are not about occupations, yet they're still not quite there, apparently.

Games should be able to tell mundane stories that are not about occupations and are also sufficiently complex enough to meet your arbitrary complexity requirement.

... Why? This just sounds absurd to me. It seems like you're just constantly making the request more specific until it is no longer true.

Is it also a problem that there aren't very many movies that are Sci Fi stories, aren't about saving the world (or galaxy), and have 15,000 or more spoken words?

Not to mention the fact that some games do fit your strange criteria quite well. Everything you've asked for applies to the Sims. Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble fits too, I think, and Japanese dating sims would probably work too.

 

[Pogilrup]

I don't really get what your point is. Why is this extremely specific type of story so important to represent?

Games can tell stories (obviously), but this isn't enough. Games can tell mundane stories, but that's still not quite good enough. Games can tell mundane stories that are not about occupations, yet they're still not quite there, apparently.

Games should be able to tell mundane stories that are not about occupations and are also sufficiently complex enough to meet your arbitrary complexity requirement.

... Why? This just sounds absurd to me. It seems like you're just constantly making the request more specific until it is no longer true.

Is it also a problem that there aren't very many movies that are Sci Fi stories, aren't about saving the world (or galaxy), and have 15,000 or more spoken words?

Not to mention the fact that some games do fit your strange criteria quite well. Everything you've asked for applies to the Sims. Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble fits too, I think, and Japanese dating sims would probably work too.

Has anyone ever tried do a memoir or biography as a videogame?

It would certainly be something new.

 

[FPLOON]

Games are crap at narrative. Long cuts scenes where you sit passively for the game to tell you the story its the opposite of the active involvement of game play.

Isn't that... films? A long cut scene where you watch what happens. Video games can do that AND get you involved in the acting. That means the video games have far more potential.

Wait... Wouldn't that be the equivalent of someone watching a horror film, telling the character on screen "Don't go into that damn house, you idiot!", the character in the film immediately turning to face the person who said that, saying "Alright I will! You don't have to yell at me or call me an idiot!", and then proceeds to walk(?) the other way, thus cutting out about several minutes of "fluff" that probably would have lead to that character's death in the first place?

Oh my glob, I just brought up a [possible] positive about the Kinect, didn't I?

Perhaps this failure to capture the general mundane is why videogame are not yet regarded as art on par with that of older forms of art.

At the risk of being the boring film person, the reason that video games haven't gotten the "art" label yet is because we are only 20 years in. It took films about 60 years or so before they were regarded as art, and it had a massive movement to do so.

Video games have only properly kicked in our generation. It will be our grandchildren who have video games as art, probably about the time that some new media has risen which will corrupt the children and breed murderers.

It doesn't help with the label "video games", which was fine then by doesn't really sound very impressive now. Literature has a ring of gravitas to it.

Wait... I thought it took about 40+ years before films were even divided between which ones qualified as "art" and which ones were purely for "entertainment" aka "not art"? But, other than that, my grandpeoples better make me proud to be a gamer once people like... uh... Roger Ebert(?) are proven wrong about video games being art...

OT: Making the mundane worth playing in video game form, eh? Well, the only thing I would support for a game like that is some type of gardening-based game, where you go around various houses and neighborhoods, cutting/trimming the lawn, planting some choice flowers, etc. all to raise money so that you could, one day, own that new luxury item you've been eyeing on since before the game "started"... Seeing as how Papers, Please is the "benchmark"(?) these days, let's just say that this game would be the Paper, Please of gardening... which, now that I think about, should incorporate an element where you're juggling between raising money for that luxury item, paying off your bills every month, AND keeping your gardening equipment up to par with the task at hand... (Just don't tell me how the game end, though...)

 

[DEAD34345]

snip

Has anyone ever tried do a memoir or biography as a videogame?

It would certainly be something new.

I doubt making a memoir or biography as a videogame would really work at all. Those are both pure non-fiction, while the only thing that separates a video game from a movie is interactivity (which runs directly counter to that). Either the game would be interactive and thus inaccurate in some ways (making it "based on a true story" but not exactly a memoir or biography), or the interactivity would have to be removed, making it just a movie.

 

[Something Amyss]

The "problem" is that a game's primary objective is escapism, not narration. It's like John Carmack said - "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". It CAN be important, but it's not inherently important. Just look at the origin of games. Pong, Pacman, Tetris, Asteroids...

At the same time, movies originated from novelty shorts. we went from a shot of a train traveling towards the screen to Citizen Kane in under fifty years.

I think, however (and OT), the larger reason here is that we don't need to conquer this "frontier." People simply aren't inclined to use games for this purpose right now, and it'd be a major sea change if they became interested.

And honestly, I'm not sure I care if they ever do. Other media probably plays to those strengths better.

 

[Super Cyborg]

I don't think games that are all about mundane stuff are going to be popular, or even become that niche. There are games that seem to add some Mundane stuff into it, whether it adds perks by doing it or is just part of the game, and I think that works better.

Persona 3+4 have where you to choose between hanging out with friends, studying, working, and other stuff as well as going through each dungeon to keep going through the dungeon. A lot of the stuff is things people have to do and don't care about, but one has to do it anyways. I feel like Shadow of the Colossus does this as well. You might be spending 10-30 minutes traveling around to get to the next Colossus, with nothing else to really do. It shows how traveling around in a barren land can be boring until you come across your goal, or something different.

 

[PsychicTaco115]

The game doesn't revolve centrally around it but you do mundane stuff in Mafia II

I haven't played it so I can't comment on how well it translates into gameplay but IIRC weren't people complaining of how it wasn't needed?

So why have all the boring bits in games?

 

[Savagezion]

The go to to make cutscenes more interactive is dialogue choices. However, you could also do a sort of quick time event where failure doesn't mean reload, (death) it means you failed and thus the story goes another route. For example, a game has you playing as a little kid trying to get a glass of milk and there is a mini-game where you have to hold the trigger buttons and rotate both joysticks sometimes fast and awkwardly to keep it level without spilling. Failing makes a mess or plain has you drop it. The story continues either way you do it and failing has consequences while succeeding may not.

Games need to avoid having "reload last save" be the consequence. Note that I said avoid and not quit. However, as the OP stated, I think it would be good to have a narrative focused game on the mundane lives of others. Escapism is escapism without needing something so far fetched. The drama genre of movies is still escapism. We escape our lives to see the problems in someone else's.

 

[Pogilrup]

When one tries to focus on mundane internal conflicts, the game get called a "walking simulator".

 

[Mr.Savage]

The "problem" is that a game's primary objective is escapism, not narration. It's like John Carmack said - "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important". It CAN be important, but it's not inherently important. Just look at the origin of games. Pong, Pacman, Tetris, Asteroids...

Personally, I have a really hard time escaping into a game if there isn't a decent story with it. What's the point of playing something if there isn't (well written) context?

Now this doesn't apply to all games, and I can get into simpler games from time to time. But let's compare Super Mario World 3 to, say, Another World. They're both great sidescrollers, but because Another World has so much atmosphere, tension, and story, I'm able to personally immerse myself far deeper than I possibly could with Mario. Instead of being a game, it becomes something to 'experience'.

I'd also be hesitant to put much stock into what John Carmack says about story in games. Seeing as he virtually had been creating the same game for the past 20 years, just with improved engines and graphics (Not to say they didn't improve). Hell, I even think one of the reasons John Romero left Id Software was because he wanted to add more story elements to the games they were making, which Carmack refused to do. He just really doesn't seem to be interested in stories.

Another example is Doom gets boring pretty quick for me, but take the same mechanics and add a well written, intriguing narrative? Now you have Deus Ex, arguably one of the finest games ever made in the genre.

So yeah, I'd say story is pretty important. How good it should be depends on the type of experience you want to create.

The game doesn't revolve centrally around it but you do mundane stuff in Mafia II

I haven't played it so I can't comment on how well it translates into gameplay but IIRC weren't people complaining of how it wasn't needed?

So why have all the boring bits in games?

Having played Mafia both 1 & 2, I can confirm you do do 'mundane' things. In the second one, that usually involves starting each mission or chapter in your house waking up, driving to 'work' to receive a story advancing mission, then driving to the mission. After the mission is complete, you usually drive back to 'work' to drop off anyone who came with you, then head back to your home to sleep.

I personally didn't like the second game nearly as much as the first, but I enjoyed the mundane driving around...Kinda added to my immersion. But I love driving around 1930's to 50's cities, so maybe I'm the odd one out.

 

[Pogilrup]

I was also going to bring up Eve online, where your narrative is more or less one of personal milestones that are semi-scripted but partly user-generated to give them individual weight.

The OP also seems to have missed pretty much the entire WW2 games subgenre. You're not usually any kind of super-soldier with magical and/or ninja powers in a WW2 game, typically you're just a random soldier doing normal, mundane wartime soldier stuff-- operations that are sometimes important, sometimes less so, sometimes successful or not depending on factors that are mostly out of your hands.

Most crime-genre games where you aren't playing the actual criminals are pretty day-to-day and paced around character lifestyle plot-points instead of trying for epic scope.

Basically the style of story you're complaining is "missing" is pretty well-represented in the industry, and I'm not sure what your'e whining about.

Then perhaps we should do war and crime from a different perspective.

Currently in development is "This War of Mine". Also I assume you have at least have been introduced to "Across Five Aprils" by high school.

One is a war story in which you are noncombatant trying to survive and outlast the war. The other is about a family torn apart by a civil war.

 

[Albino Boo]

Games are crap at narrative. Long cuts scenes where you sit passively for the game to tell you the story its the opposite of the active involvement of game play.

Isn't that... films? A long cut scene where you watch what happens. Video games can do that AND get you involved in the acting. That means the video games have far more potential.

Nope because you are still operating on someone else script. Games succeed or fail on their gameplay alone, you could have the greatest plot in the world but if the gameplay is bad it won't matter. Film and TV live and die by a combination of narrative and characterisation. There are hundreds of games that have no plot or character at all yet are successful because of their gameplay. Many sandbox or strategy games for example have no narrative whatsoever.

Games are fundamentally an active medium and film is a passive medium and trying to force games to be a passive medium means you take control away from the player. If you take too much control away from the player you may as well just have made a CGI film.

 

[Mike Richards]

Games are crap at narrative. Long cuts scenes where you sit passively for the game to tell you the story its the opposite of the active involvement of game play.

Isn't that... films? A long cut scene where you watch what happens. Video games can do that AND get you involved in the acting. That means the video games have far more potential.

Nope because you are still operating on someone else script. Games succeed or fail on their gameplay alone, you could have the greatest plot in the world but if the gameplay is bad it won't matter. Film and TV live and die by a combination of narrative and characterisation. There are hundreds of games that have no plot or character at all yet are successful because of their gameplay. Many sandbox or strategy games for example have no narrative whatsoever.

Games are fundamentally an active medium and film is a passive medium and trying to force games to be a passive medium means you take control away from the player. If you take too much control away from the player you may as well just have made a CGI film.

You're right that actively bad gameplay will cripple a good story, in much the same way that unbearable direction can kill a great script or terrible prose can kill a great plot. The point works with mechanics solo too, if your early sections have unplayable design, it won't really matter that the later ones are the best thing that anyone has ever played.

But there's still the question of games in which the gameplay is serviceable but unspectacular, while the story is worth following. You only have to look at how Spec Ops The Line took a lot of flak for it's relatively uninteresting gunplay, or the comments that routinely come up every time anyone mentions the likes of Dear Esther or Gone Home to see that games that want to try and put story very much in first place have a tendency to get the shit kicked out of them for no other reason then wanting to put story first.

So if the gameplay works but isn't worth experiencing on its own, but only because it's being used as a delivery mechanism for a story that is worth experiencing, is it still a failure because 'games succeed or fail on gameplay alone'? Or is it allowed to decide what it's going to put a focus on in the same way that a movie can be beautifully directed but have an incredibly basic script, or conversely have effective but very basic and unintrusive direction to put the focus on it's story?

 

[Albino Boo]

You're right that actively bad gameplay will cripple a good story, in much the same way that unbearable direction can kill a great script or terrible prose can kill a great plot. The point works with mechanics solo too, if your early sections have unplayable design, it won't really matter that the later ones are the best thing that anyone has ever played.

But there's still the question of games in which the gameplay is serviceable but unspectacular, while the story is worth following. You only have to look at how Spec Ops The Line took a lot of flak for it's relatively uninteresting gunplay, or the comments that routinely come up every time anyone mentions the likes of Dear Esther or Gone Home to see that games that want to try and put story very much in first place have a tendency to get the shit kicked out of them for no other reason then wanting to put story first

So if the gameplay works but isn't worth experiencing on its own, but only because it's being used as a delivery mechanism for a story that is worth experiencing, is it still a failure because 'games succeed or fail on gameplay alone'? Or is it allowed to decide what it's going to put a focus on in the same way that a movie can be beautifully directed but have an incredibly basic script, or conversely have effective but very basic and unintrusive direction to put the focus on it's story?

Civilization is franchise that has been going for 20 odd years with no narrative at all. TF2 has no story, all those COD and battlefield multiplayers are not using narrative. The goal in most multiplayers is to win. Why try to turn games into film and TV when they can function perfectly well without narrative and character.

Story limits choice to what someone else thinks the character would do or what event happens. Dear Easter or Gone Home limit you to a narrow framework of choice by design and thats why they failed to be popular. You could have the near infinite combinations of the narrative void that is TF2 or the narrow choices of someone elses story.

 

[Pogilrup]

You're right that actively bad gameplay will cripple a good story, in much the same way that unbearable direction can kill a great script or terrible prose can kill a great plot. The point works with mechanics solo too, if your early sections have unplayable design, it won't really matter that the later ones are the best thing that anyone has ever played.

But there's still the question of games in which the gameplay is serviceable but unspectacular, while the story is worth following. You only have to look at how Spec Ops The Line took a lot of flak for it's relatively uninteresting gunplay, or the comments that routinely come up every time anyone mentions the likes of Dear Esther or Gone Home to see that games that want to try and put story very much in first place have a tendency to get the shit kicked out of them for no other reason then wanting to put story first

So if the gameplay works but isn't worth experiencing on its own, but only because it's being used as a delivery mechanism for a story that is worth experiencing, is it still a failure because 'games succeed or fail on gameplay alone'? Or is it allowed to decide what it's going to put a focus on in the same way that a movie can be beautifully directed but have an incredibly basic script, or conversely have effective but very basic and unintrusive direction to put the focus on it's story?

Civilization is franchise that has been going for 20 odd years with no narrative at all. TF2 has no story, all those COD and battlefield multiplayers are not using narrative. The goal in most multiplayers is to win. Why try to turn games into film and TV when they can function perfectly well without narrative and character.

Story limits choice to what someone else thinks the character would do or what event happens. Dear Easter or Gone Home limit you to a narrow framework of choice by design and thats why they failed to be popular. You could have the near infinite combinations of the narrative void that is TF2 or the narrow choices of someone elses story.

Just because it is good enough, doesn't mean it can't be better.

I look forward to the day when one can adapt high school lit material into a decent videogame.