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MARIO IS JUST FINE
I love good movies. I love good books. I love good TV series. I’m a huge fan of noninteractive media. Yet I skip through most cutscenes in videogames. Why is this?
The other day, a popular internet reviewer criticized Super Mario Galaxy 2 for having a weak story. The game's story consists of little more than Bowser kidnapping the princess and Mario having to go through a bunch of abstract worlds in order to find her.
That is more than enough for me. Games like Mario Galaxy shouldn’t have a complex story. What possible story could you come up with to explain why Mario has ride a giant hamster ball accross a wooden plank floating in the sky, or why Bowser goes from being roughly the same size as Mario to the size of an office building?
I’m sure you could come up with a story that explains it all if you really wanted to. You could include a cutscene of Bowser sucking Mario into his transdimensional warp machine to explain why Mario plays through so many absurd and varied environments. You could include a cutscene of Bowswer searching the universe for the elusive power orb to explain why he can grow to 70 feet tall. And so on.
But why? What’s the point? Is there really a story worth telling? If the story of Bowser and his transdimensional warp machine wasn’t attached to a game, would you want to read it? If you pitched the story to a studio do you think they’d turn it into a holywood movie? My guess is no.
STORY OR EXCUSE?
It seems like often the story of a videogame is really just an excuse for why it is that the player has to do some bit of gameplay. You can explain why Mario is suddenly riding a stingray down a hovering waterslide by talking about a multi-dimensional transporter, but he's really doing it because some Japanese guy thought it would be fun. And he was right. Likewise, Bowser is the size of a skyscraper because some Japanese guy thought it would be an interesting boss encounter. And it is.
In the puzzle-platformer Trine, there’s a long cutscene explaining how 3 people with different abilities touched a crystal which fused them into one body. This crystal is central to the plot, but it’s really just an excuse for why only one character is on screen at a time. The developers thought it would be fun to switch, on the fly, between 3 different characters who each had a unique ability. This makes a great game mechanic, but I wouldn’t want to read a novel about it.
GOOD STORIES DON'T FIT
The fact is that most compelling narratives from books and movies don't work for an action game. This includes narratives from action movies. Some of my favorite movies are Terminator 2, Star Wars, Predator, and 12 Monkeys. None of these work as stories for an action game.
Take your average 3rd or first person shooter. The basic structure consists of the player trudging through about15 levels, killing 30-60 guys between in each one. Sometimes he’ll have to flip a switch, take cover behind objects, move stealthily, defend a location for a set amount of time, or whatever.
This structure can be a lot of fun when it’s pulled off creatively. But it isn't very conducive to a good narrative.
THE TERMINATOR BECOMES AN ACTION GAME
For example, let’s try to fit the story of The Terminator, a classic action movie, into a modern action game. The movie has a number of actions scenes that we will try to make into levels.
The movie starts off with the hero, Reece, teleporting into the year 1985. He arrives in the middle of the night, naked and unarmed.
He steals a pistol off a cop and then hides in a department store where he steals some clothes. That's the end of the scene.
So we’re gonna have to make some changes to make this into a good first level. First of all, we’ll have to add at least 12 more cops for Reece to fight. So Reece murders a good number of police officers and is now on the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. And we're only 10 minutes into the movie.
The movie's next action scene involves a gun battle in a techno club between Reece and the Terminator.
It’s a short scene consisting mainly of Reece pumping a couple shotgun shells into the Terminator’s sternum and then running away.
So this is gonna require some big changes to make into a proper level. Maybe Reece gets into a gun fight, on the way to the bar, with 20 to 30 nondescript gang members that want to turn him into the FBI for the bounty. Maybe the fight with the Terminator in the club can be a boss fight for the level. Maybe the club’s security door is locked preventing Reece from fleeing the club like he does in the movie. So while the player keeps the Terminator at bay, Sarah, the movie’s love interest, can be hacking the security door. We’ll make Sarah a computer expert in the videogame version.
Let’s skip to the movie's climax for the last level. In the movie, a car chase ends with the terminator being burned down to his metal endoskeleton.
Reece is unarmed, save for a home-made pipebomb that he lodges in the terminator’s sternum. The pipe bomb blows off the Terminator's legs but Reece is killed in the process. Then the legless terminator crawls after Sarah. She leads it into an industrial vice, presses a button, and crushes it to death. So this one's gonna need a lot of work.
First of all, a character in an action game shouldn’t lose abilities as the game progresses. Rather, it’s good game design to steadily give the player new abilities thereby steadily adding more depth to the gameplay. So for the climax, we’ll have to give Reece an rpg, a minigun, and a few grenades. Also the last level should be the biggest challenge in the game. So we’ll have to add in some other Terminators for Reece to fight. Maybe they teleport in from the future.
Also, the Terminator, as the final boss, needs to become stronger for the last confrontation, not weaker. So rather than being burnt down to an endoskeleton, the Terminator can plug himself into a powerline to become a 20 foot tall Super Terminator! With shoulder-mounted missle launchers!
Only after a lengthy battle against the Super Terminator and his future army, can Reece be killed. Then we can have Sarah push a button to crush the Terminator in a vice - a great quick time event if there ever was one.
So there you have it. We took a tight story with a clear antagonist and focused action and turned into crap (aka a typical action game story). But from a gameplay standpoint, the game I just described has the potential to be a lot of fun. So why should it keep being interrupted with a lousy story?
DOES THIS MATTER?
Ok so maybe most videogame cutscenes are inane wastes of time, but I can skip past them right? Why am I bitching?
Because sometimes skipping can cost you. It’s rare, but about 1 in every 30 cutscenes will give you some information you actually need to know to play the game.
For instance you’ll skip a cutscene and then you’ll find yourself standing in an open field with a mission objective on your screen that says “Pick up Shelly’s hyperdrive at Fort Blackstone”. So then you have to ask "who’s Shelly?", "what the hell does a hyperdrive look like?", and "which one of those buildings in the distance is Fort Blackstone?". All of those questions were answered in the cutscene you skipped and have no way of rewatching.
Again, this doesn’t happen often, but you never know when it’s gonna strike. It's not as if some game boxes say “all cutscenes contain no useful information”. So you end up sitting through pages and pages of inane dialog because you’re so afraid of missing something important. So this matters.
WHAT ABOUT THAT OTHER 20%?
So what types of games should have complex, involved stories? Easy: the games that are based around stories to begin with. If the inspiration for making the game was to tell a story, than there’s a chance the story is actually worth telling. This is the case for games like Monkey Island, King's Quest, and Heavy Rain but is not the case for Gears of War.
So if you’re making the kind of game where poorly-written dialogue could significantly effect sales and review scores, then tell your writer to go nuts. Otherwise, briefly explain why I have to collect 8 pieces of triangle from 8 dungeons, and then shut the hell up.
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All games have a plot, but probably less than 25% actually has a story.
A plot simply ties things together. (any game that brags it has xx campaigns smells of a "plot only" game with no story to me)
Game types:
No plot nor story: Puzzle games mostly like Tetris, Pong, Checkers etc.
Plot only: Majority of games out there,
Story only: Rare as it's almost impossible to write s story without a plot (direction(s)) to hold it together.
Plot and Story: far less than one might assume, great examples are The Longest Journey by Funcom and Knights of The Old Republic by BioWare.
If the plot sucks then no matter how good the storywriting is...it will suffer. Likewise if the plot is good but the storywriting sucks the plot will suffer equally as well.
So please do not try and pretend that what games like Mario does is storytelling, because it's really not.
It's just a loosely tied plot with plot exposition, rather than a actual narrative story.
Luckily a few developers still get the chance to do narrative storytelling rather than just plot exposition to tie action stuff together. BioWare is exemplary in that regard. (KoTOR, Dragon Age, Mass Effect)
And games like GTA are a mix of both story and plot driven games, although there the story is placed inside the plot driven game. (small plot exposition for the various non-story missions)
And it doesn't help that hardly any review sites or magazines out there has no "Story" score. They score audio, graphics, design, and whatnot, but not the story.
I'd be perfectly fine to see Tetris with a 0 score for story (since it has none),
and a game like The Longest Journey with a score like 95% (it's got a story, and it's damn good).
For example: http://emsai.net/reviews/game/
This is mostly for my own amusement and testing, but the scoring system is interesting as it's reverse of what pretty much everyone else is doing.
It defaults to a perfect score, then for each flaw or dislike the score is reduced.
If a game really had no story to speak of then the story score could be 0.
If the game had no Sound the score would be blank (or if the sound doesn't work it would get a sound score of 0 obviously).
Sound, Graphics, Story, Design. are technical, Design is a catchall where sound graphics and story can't be used to classify what is being scored. Plot and puzzle etc would thus fall under design.
Total is my (aka the reviewer's) overall impression. The average of these thus becomes the final score. (reviewer's impression thus affect the final score by a 1/5th).
It's not easy to Google for games with a good story (or the reverse, those with bad ones), or games that has no story (which you seem to prefer when you just want to "game").
For a puzzle platform game this is fine, and although it would score low in my Story score, the game if well made would still score high in the total.
Note! I used to have a Summed score but that was rolled into the Total score, so if a particular the technical score pulls the game down (like a story score for a Mario game) then the reviewer can pull the total score up to what they feel it deserves). The point is, people that are interested in a story (or not) can easily look at the story score and determine their choice on that for example rather than the total score.
It's clear you want your action games to be non-stop, and the cut-scene device is what irritates you, you just wrongfully blamed the story mechanic as the source of your irritation.
Also, making up random statistics doesn't help to prove your point. 1 in 30 cut-scenes? The other 20%?
"It's clear you want your action games to be non-stop, and the cut-scene device is what irritates you, you just wrongfully blamed the story mechanic as the source of your irritation."
It's not just the cutscene mechanic that bothers me. I don't like a story much better if it happens while I'm still in control of my character or if I'm forced to extract it from NPC conversations.
And it's not that I want my action to be non-stop. I like exploration, inventory management, etc. It's just that if I'm going to be forced to stop playing the game, I'd like to be doing something equally entertaining. Watching some game designer play movie director is generally not my idea of entertainment.
Like someone mentioned previously, the Final Fantasy series have an extremely involved set of character relationships structured around a very simple gameplay structure. This series has been wildly successful, and for good reason.
If the story of a game isn't interesting to begin with, no amount of beautiful cinematography, animation or special effects are going to save it. The player is going to be bored out of their mind, praying that the skip button works. However, when the characters in a game are compelling and empathetic, it makes you want to know more about them, it makes you care about their problems, and it very well may make you want to watch the cut scenes.
I just think you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. You have encountered a number of action games that had horrible stories, but that doesn't mean they have to be.
Come to think of it, Left for Dead does the same thing. Throw any player into any level and they'll have a blast but you will passively learn the story as you go along. There is just enough at the surface to make it believable and then enough deeper down, when you start to look for it, to satisfy those that want a story. I have a lot of respect for Valve for taking this approach with their games.
"Oh there's the car we drove out of the mall, but the highway is blocked so that's why we're on foot now..."
Ouch. That's the exact same thing one of my professors said, but I disagree. If I don't care about the characters, why should I bother saving their world? Unless we're talking about a game like Tetris, some form of story should be used to enhance the game's experience.
Though, I believe even Tetris could use a funny science-fiction plot...
the story telling that belongs in games is the stories created by well executed game mechanics implemented in the right situations. Alien Breed is a great example of this. They have an awesome mechanic where you can weld doors shut just like in Aliens.
Now if this story was being told "movie style" there would be two specific doors in a level where large swarms of aliens would be coming and you would specifically have to close them in time or you would automatically die. Those would be the only two doors in the level that could be welded and it would basically automatically happen once you got inside and triggered an event.
Alien swarm does it "gameplay style" where you can sacrifice to keep a welder in your limited inventory and you can weld almost any door in the game so when you are in a desperate situation you can find a good room or hallway, weld the door shut, and get a moments respite before you leap back into the fray. All the while feeling like you are making it happen yourself and feeling heroic or clever, and it actually creates stories on it's own that you are excited about, and it's very memorable. Telling the story movie style is much more commonly done but much less potent.
I always see comments about how games can tell more immersive stories than movies because they are interactive, but that interactivity is rarely used for anything but letting players go through somebody else's story. But as somebody who would rather be making games than movies, I think the real storytelling potential in games can only be unlocked when we actually start using our medium to tell stories, and our medium has more to learn from sports and board games than it does from movies.
In my opinion, one of the reasons that too much emphasis is put on game stories is game reviews. First off, they penalize games that don't have good stories (or more specifically, "good" relative to other games), and second, they all start with the story instead of the gameplay, regardless of whether that's appropriate for the game.
Let's take, for example, Just Cause 2. The game wasn't meant to have much of a story, but the game trailers review still slammed its overall score for the lack. To me, that's like penalizing Diner Dash for not having a good shooting mechanic. If the game wasn't mean to appeal to a certain type of person or play type, don't assume that it should because you're measuring it against some checklist of "what a game is supposed to have".
Move on to the GameSpot review. Gamespot was smart enough not to list the lack of story in the "Bad" section, so presumably they didn't cut the score for it. On the other hand, the review starts with a huge wall of text telling you about the story and storytelling, so that the information that anybody who is looking for that kind of game cares about is buried at the bottom of the article.
So many of the games-must-have-stories people will throw in the caveat "but it's okay for puzzle games to not have stories". Why do puzzle games get this exception and nothing else? To me, that's the same as when people say that Zelda games should never have voice acting but then they later complain if any other game skips on it. They've simply put their stamp of approval on what the industry has been doing for a while rather than properly questioning and analyzing why these trends exist and whether they should be strictly maintained.
You seriously think that game designers are letting gameplay go by the wayside for story? I think that assumption is beyond ignorant. Story is what drives most games...and you know what you are getting before you ever open the box.
If you want to just run around and shoot people, there are a plethora of FPS games that not only have an engaging story, but also have mindless killing options for you attention span challenged; and you'll find similar results with nearly ever other genre as well.
The real problem is that you have a problem with all games not fullfilling your niche...cry me a river, again you know darn well before you ever buy a game, whether or not a game is being pushed by story or by mindless action. It's not enough that you can button mash your way through most cut scenes and story breaks...you just want to get on and never run into a 30 seconds of cinematic....OH NOES!!
Guess what...80's arcade stye is that way ------->
For example, Mario Galaxy and Mario Galaxy 2. I enjoyed the 1st one simply because it was finally a new Mario and the fight against Bowser was pretty epic. However, the second one showed no logic and continuity. Now you can say "yeah eating mushrooms isn't very logical or being in space with no air" but that's not the point. It makes sense in the mushroom kingdom. I would like there to at least be a motivation and a solid story, no matter how simplistic.
A great story drives the gameplay even more. When killing a character matters, or saving someone from being killed and it could affect the story, then the gameplay is amplified x100.
I would say that Terminator could work as a game, but only if you carefully crafted the mechanics around the story, say, making it a more cat and mouse chase through the game levels while Sarah and Reese run from authorities. The Terminator could be a more tense adversary if he's made omnipresent instead of being in a few boss battles.
Anyway, I think this article does a great job of pointing out the problem with considering story and gameplay separately and adding them together at the last minute through passive methods such as cutscenes. Why watch it when you can be playing it?
"You seriously think that game designers are letting gameplay go by the wayside for story? I think that assumption is beyond ignorant. Story is what drives most games...and you know what you are getting before you ever open the box. "
This is absolutely not what I think. I don't think designers are sacrificing gameplay for story. I think I'm sacrificing my time that I could be having fun on hearing a story that wasn't well thought out or well-written. Some games have good writing (Portal comes to mind) or good stories (Half-Life 2 for example), but most have neither.
I would rather have a simple setup that gives the action context than watch (or read) oodles of boring, poorly-written dialog. And despite what you might think, it's rare to know if a story's going to be good before you open the box. Game reviewers will give a story a passing grade as long as it meets the low standard of videogame stories.
"If you want to just run around and shoot people, there are a plethora of FPS games that not only have an engaging story, but also have mindless killing options for you attention span challenged."
I'm not exactly sure why you equate minimal story with 'mindless'. I like my games complex via interesting gameplay and level design. Some of my favorite games are World of Goo, Shadow of Colossus, and Super Metroid. I wouldn't call any of those games mindless, but they all had minimal story sequences.
If the player's story of his or her gameplay experience doesn't mesh with the story presented in the game then we run into problems pointed out by Ian. This is when people start skipping dialog and cut-scenes.
A good story in the game anticipates what the player experience is and magnifies it. If you can pull that off then it doesn't matter how the story is delivered since delivery is not the problem here.
I'll go ahead and challenge this statement but with the caveat that "story" in a game doesn't always mean Final Fantasy style expositions.
Humans tell stories. From cave paintings to modern day works of literature. A story can be real or fictional, literal or abstract but one thing is certain; story permeates the culture of humans. We make decisions based on stories that someone tells be it a lie or a sales pitch. We decide what to feel based on a story someone tells us and how its delivered from a break-up note to a motivational speech framed into a narrative of someone's struggle.
So I wonder why we as a species would suddenly not care about stories when we decide what games we want to buy?
That said, I think your argument is more regarding exposition during gameplay than story itself. You mention Shadow of the Colossus in your comment above, but I'd argue that it did have a good story to it. It also had cut scenes, although they involved minimal speech and were all fairly short. Instead, you draw the story from the way the character, horse, and colossi behave during gameplay, as well as way your character changes as you progress through the game. If that's what you're really getting at, then sure, I'd agree with you. Exposition and cutscenes are overused in some games and flat out have no place in others. I don't think that means story should be focused on any less or at the expense of gameplay though.
I think the more interesting topic is what methods of storytelling play more to the strengths of each genre or games as a whole.
Anyway, I mostly agree with you. A story artificially tacked on to a game that doesn't need it is silly. But where does one draw the line between story and excuse? That is what the industry needs to do now.
Perhaps, part of the solution is to know what to cut? It's hard to throw away your hard work and expensive assets but the best creators in all media do it and ultimately it leads to a better experience. If you make a game and then realise the story is a bit tedious despite your best efforts then cut some out. Have the courage to throw away paragraphs of dialogue and minutes of cut scenes. This one takes strong leadership too, I would imagine, as it is likely to upset someone on the team.
I seem to remember the World of Goo creators stating that they threw away many levels before releasing their end product...
I understand that providing a crappy design was useful to make your point, but I believe it's a more wider design problem. Game designers should stop to map IP on usual game mechanics, but instead they should try to find inspiration from the IP. Folowing arbitrary rules, like "a character in an action game shouldn’t lose abilities as the game progresses" doesn't help to catch what an IP is about. Moreover, Super Mario may lose his ability to throw fireball during the game, and it's perfectly fine !
A Terminator game faithful to the IP would be about fleeing away from the killer robot (aka : going through a level), and confronting him from time to time (aka : boss fight).
Fleeing away is well implemented in dino run, or in pac man (kind of). The first is an example of a somewhat linear level with a danger from behind, and the second is a non linear level, with dispersed "objectives". Both could inspire the terminator game.
A lot can be done : shotgun shot the terminator in order to stun him for one (cumulative) second, take cover when he decide to shoot, move when he reloads. Even the old trick with the explosive barrils seems valid (after all, the robot doesn't care...). In a multiplayer settings, it remember me splinter cell 3 : this game feature a 2 vs 2 mode in witch agent could only stun there opponent...
Sure, it would need a lot of prototype to get it right, but such a game have a great potential.
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This said, I think the real issue is the same it's ever been: designers and game companies either not being sure who their real audience/market is (and what they really want) or trying to "scattershot" and reach as much of everyone at the cost of annoying and potentially pushing away said real audience/market.
The supposed "argument" over the "importance of story" is a non-starter. We all know that what distinguishes one title from another in the market is not mechanics (which are relatively unchanged in the last, what, twenty years?), it's presentation; part of that presentation IS story.
It's what makes people perk and wonder what the title offers.
It's what makes them decide to try it.
It's what makes them decide to buy it.
It's what makes them tell their friends, family, and co-workers about it.
I do not think there really IS an "argument" to be had between mechanics and story. Rather, that there is a discussion necessary as to how much story is enough from genre to genre, game to game, and, more importantly, does the level and amount of story being presented compete with or enhance the mechanics?
Let's face it, games are not about story, but story definitely supports and enhances them. Any given "world" needs some degree of story to present its purpose, culture, and motivating factors. Whether or not it needs more depends heavily upon who one is intending to buy and play it.
For me, a game that allows story to interfere with "getting to the game" is little more than a demonstration that the company who made it doesn't deserve my dollars, and when a game gets it right (escapable cut scenes, replayable cut scenes, alternatives to cut scenes, et al), I not only remember, I tell my friends.
Oh, and I buy copies for them, too. (grin)
Analyzing THAT game might add something new to the discussion.
It was primarily through the cutscenes that I was able to get a sense of my character, and it was in anticipation of having his origins explained further that I pushed through the more frustrating platforming segments and QTEs. In short, while I'm sure there are plenty of gamers who would have loved God of War even with no cutscenes, for me, they made the game whole and worth completing: it was a mindless action game in need of a story, and by game's end it had a fairly decent one.
Regardless, it all comes down to taste. And there's room for all flavors. Not sure why more folks don't realize this.
Ultimately, we have to step back and examine why we want the depth of character interactions and conflicts themselves. Story is a device, and those principles can be applied to games - but they can't always be copied and pasted... Just as many principles in music composition can be applied to story-structure, but they can't be copied and pasted.
And that said, games truly need better writers and more interesting characters. Nine times out of ten, when I don't care about what's happening it's because I don't care about the characters. The same thing happens in film, the theater and novels. Games need to do a better job of making characters we actually like or find otherwise uniquely compelling.
Story does belong in games, though it isn't always necessary. Just because it hasn't often been done correctly in the few decades of commercial design doesn't mean that it can't, or shouldn't, be done.
Now, can game designers focus on making interactions in games meaningful (not simply fun)?