You wont ever get that. Literature is all about character and narrative and description. All of those are in the hands of author and allow no interactivity. You can't have of Mice and Men that has a happy ending, the whole point of the story is the death at the end. To make them a game you would change the plot entirely by allowing choice which is outside of the vision of the author.Pogilrup said:
Why can't we do the little things: A thread about videogame stories
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albino boo said:
You're making a lot of assumptions about what something /has/ to do. You complain that story in games prevents players from making choices, then say you couldn't you couldn't adapt Of Mice and Men without being forced to give people the ability to choose a 'good' ending. Which is it?albino boo said:
Games are by definition sets of rules, rules are by definition limitations of what you can do. Video games are a space in which you can do /some/ things but not /all/ things, no matter how wide it's rules or open-ended and emergent it's design there will always be limits. And not just limits of what the developers are capable of doing but what they want the player to be allowed to do. So how is story any different? Something will always be holding players back, if you really have to look at it that way, so how is making one of the things that's holding you back something entertaining and valuable in its own right a problem? And that's only if you choose to look at it as a restriction first and foremost anyways.
Just because one game does something one way doesn't mean that suddenly everything has to do it that way, there are no laws about what you can and can't do. You say that we can have either near infinite combinations in a narrative void (which is probably an exaggeration but that's semantics) or the narrow path of someone's narrative. Why does one of those options have to be inherently better then the other in every circumstance?
All you're saying is that there are games that exist without story, so therefor if it isn't always absolutely necessary it isn't ever needed in anything. Well, I guess we made silent films in black and white for years, so clearly you don't /need/ color or sound. It doesn't matter that these are tools skilled filmmakers can use to be powerful and evocative and create the kind of film that /they/ want to, the industry got by for 20 odd years with neither of them at all. Civilization has been enormously successful without any kind of gunplay, so I guess obviously there aren't any games that need shooting. It doesn't matter that it's intended to be a totally different kind of experience a lot of people enjoy and directly comparing the two yields very little, that franchise over there made it work so now that's the rule.
If you don't enjoy story in games in general, or at the very least have yet to see an example that really works for you, then that's fine. You're perfectly welcome to go enjoy the things that do work for you. But there are a lot of story driven games that I love, and the idea that they inherently don't work because of false comparisons of failing to live up to what other unrelated things are doing is ridiculous. I might as well say that I hate Halo because it's a terrible RPG. Well, yeah, it is a terrible RPG, that's why it doesn't say RPG on the box.
As one last thing, Dear Esther and Gone Home didn't fail to be popular. You can be financially and/or critically successful and have a significant fan base and still have people complain on the internet. I mean, COD was virtually guaranteed to be the biggest selling game of the year every year for quite some time and it's probably the most widely mocked and despised modern franchise there is. It's not a binary switch.
#Mike Richards said:
For godsake man of mice and men is novel, there is no choice. The plot remains the same each and every time you read it. To be a game and not film you to have player action to effect the outcome. Therefore you cannot have and adaptation of novel without varying the outcome. If you change the plot then is not long the artistic vision of the writer. Its not like film where you can have good and bad adoptions but something completely different. You have to create entirely new content for it to be a game. That is the difference between the passive action of reading a book or watching a film and the active control of playing game. For story of a novel to be the most important element you have to remove control from the player at which you are watching a film not playing a game.
1. There is nothing mundane about what happens in The Crucible, To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby. All of these books display dark extremes.
2. Stories are about conflict. Games are about gameplay. The overlap is the places where conflict can be systematized.
2. Stories are about conflict. Games are about gameplay. The overlap is the places where conflict can be systematized.
You keep saying that to be a game you /have/ to allow people to change the storyline. "To be a game and not film you to have player action to effect the outcome. Therefore you cannot have and adaptation of novel without varying the outcome." This means you have to create new possible endings or it's the same as film regardless of all other gameplay. This means playing The Last of Us is exactly like watching a movie. Playing Bioshock Infinite is exactly like watching a movie. Or Half Life. Or Alan Wake. Or nearly any adventure game I can think of from Monkey Island to Longest Journey to Sam and Max to whatever. The only way it counts as a game, literally the only way it differs from being a film, is if it lets you choose different story paths.albino boo said:
In Doom, you move through the exact same levels in the exact same order with no choice or control of your destiny beyond dead and not dead. That structure remains the same every time you play it, the outcome is always, /always/ the same. The only thing you can control is 'what monster do I kill with what gun', 'what secrets do I find on the fringes of what level'. Mechanically that description is entirely identical to The Last of Us. They are the same. That's what the active control of playing a game has gotten us. How do I get from point A to point B and what do I bring with me. The Last of Us removes no more choice or control from you then Doom does, but it does give a greater context for A and B and everything that comes in between, and that context gives it a strong element to enjoy in addition to it's mechanics.
"To be a game and not film you to have player action to effect the outcome." What this comes down too is exactly what we define as player choice and exactly what we define as an outcome. If in this example you reject The Last of Us for having a narrative that railroads the player outside of your boundaries of choice and outcome, then you must also reject Doom and many others besides for the exact same level of interaction. The presence of a story hasn't changed the mechanics at all, so what's the problem? What would it have to change to not be a problem anymore? Is it just the branching narrative paths? Is it just the fact that it uses cutscenes instead of having everything happen in action? Would you have to be able to choose what order you do chapters in? At exactly what point is the player being given enough choice?
I think what albino boo is concerned about is non-action and deviation from the script.
Since he likes to use the Of Mice and Men example, how does one, as the game designer, deal with a player who just puts down the controller and let Curley beat up Lenny?
Since he likes to use the Of Mice and Men example, how does one, as the game designer, deal with a player who just puts down the controller and let Curley beat up Lenny?