By Jim Rossignol on April 7th, 2009 at 1:16 pm.
VG247 have been talking to shy and reclusive game developer Peter Molyneux about Lionhead’s ambitions. They want to tell the greatest story ever. The developer said:
“The greatest story ever told? I think it’s going to be in a computer game. And I think that if I play the greatest story ever told in the same game as you play it, your greatest story is going to be different to my greatest story. And that is power.”
Blimey. I hate stories, me. Just give me a box of toys. But what about you?
Hmm. Isn’t Molyneux known to have grand goals for his games?
Of course, I love me a good story, and if he wants to aim for such a lofty (and unreachable, IMO) goal, I’m all for it.
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Gratest story may be told by a computer game at some point in future, true, but I pretty sure it won’t be told by Mister Molyneux.
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As I don’t believe you’d miss the point so, I tip my hat to your masterful trolling Mr Rossignol.
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He’s entirely right, at least until something better than computer games turns up. But it won’t be him that makes it. Sorry, Pete.
And Über Nerd gets there first with the exact same comment as me. Damn him to the hells.
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Stories are great in linear things such as movies and books.
In games freedom+excitement > story.
Stories imply beginning, middle and end. Games are what I do to have fun, and I want to be able to stop and start my fun at will without having to ‘finish’ stuff.
I guess I prefer toys to games.
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I like a good story, and find that scripted narrative in games still had the edge in terms of depth and meaning over the more dynamic gameplay-derived story. I don’t think this gap will remain forever more, and I think we’ll also increasingly see developers trying to hybridise the two approaches. I know some have suggested that only the latter approach belongs in games, and I’d certainly agree that dynamic stories that arise out of gameplay are ones not seen in many other media, such as books and film. However if we look at where dynamic story does emerge in other media (largely other forms of play) such as improv, P&P RPG, LARPing, make-believe, in all cases the story still develops with large input from one or several humans. Its possibly no co-incidence that some of the most interesting non-scripted story comming out of gaming comes from EVE Online, where it develops almost exclusively from human input.
Of course, a sandbox approach is also fun, and in them play is capable of generating experiences which are in themselves worth recounting. However that is not to say they have any real narrative depth. (Nor to say that they should)
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I can only assume that Mr Rossignol is merely pretending to have misunderstood what Molyneux said, for the lulz?
Anyway, we all know that Molyneux’s next game will be Fable 3, after Jonathan Ross tweeted about it carelessly.
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Maybe when games get even bigger budgets and greater development times coupled with competent developers. Then, lets hope they embrace at least wikipedia and MAKE-SHIT-MAKE-SENSE. I can’t wait for the day when there is a game or movie which actually tries to make the laws of nature seem applicable to the experience. One example might be all these futuristic games where every single goddamn planet in these games seems to have earth-like gravity; earth-like atmospheric pressure, density, composition… etc. That’s just the freaking atmosphere! Just think how much screw up there is. I really get rilled up. Things like this end immersion and piss me off, and I’m no scientist. Imagine how they feel! Lawl :D
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The best story ever told is that of WoWkilluler Rasa.
It ended very apruptly and no sequel apprently. LAZY!
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My favourite games are the ones that generate their own stories. You know, when you just have to tell someone “I was driving a bike along a bridge in GTA when I flew off the edge on fire and leapt off just as it crashed into a truck and exploded” or “I only had 40 militia and a demi-cannon and I defended Warsaw against a thousand-strong army” or perhaps the epitome of story-generating games, “So this legendary axedwarf went berserk and killed his pet cow and went on a rampage before being cornered by the security forces, falling into a well and drowning”.
Obviously any degree of interactivity lets you make your own stories, but in something like HL2, for example – so heavily driven by its own plot – there’s little room to improvise your own.
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Has the greatest story already been told?! Omg.
EDIT: Click through and read the rest of the story before commenting, btw.
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The greatest story ever told is the Holy Bible starring Charlton Heston. Are games the Holy Bible? I don’t think so.
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Heh, I was just about to edit my post to similar effect. “The Greatest Story Ever Told isn’t the greatest story ever told, says Molyneux.”
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I think if games are going to tell a story greater than anything done in any other medium, it’s going to be something using a similar style to Masq. Something short, where you get to replay the same situation over and over, and learn far more about the characters than you ever could from a single linear story. A story that is more than a sequence of events, which is the normal definition of a story.
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I’ve always loved Molyneux, there’s just something right about the guy. Sure, his games might not be up to his vision, but he’s just so chipper and goodwilled.
Also, this seems to hark on the whole “the greatest story ever told is YOURS” thing. There’s the very obvious problem of games being an interactive medium, so I’d suppose that the greatest story ever told would be the one in which the most meaning could be derived from the most player input.
I think that as long as someone is dreaming of being the Dostoevsky or the Goethe or the Shakespeare of games it’s good, as long as they remember the limitations of their artform.
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The Bible: The Game!
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Am I the only person who thought the title read “Peter Molyneux In Bald Claim Shocker”?
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Limitations, or limiTUNITY? I truly believe games can have a plot better than the Godfather, but by treating games as interactive movies, it’s not going to happen. Fahrenheit comes to mind – a brilliant piece of work (until you Jump the Train) – an engaging plot and characters and writing – but ultimately it’s not making the most of being a game. That is, you could film it, or just treat it as machinima, and it would still work.
To make a good plot, developers just need to throw away the script.
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We need an anti-story revolution.
Seriously.
Too many new games go are made something like this:
Hire the writer from Alien.
Make it so, that you shoot when you press “A”. Add impressive cut scenes for advertising and gamespot video reviews. Repeat.
Game reviewers will love it, since their only comparison are other embarrassing and trashy back stories about Nazi super-soldiers.
In the end, you get a bad movie that only continues to the next scene once you press that “A” button. And game mechanics reduced to… well, let’s say a “B” button would be too confusing for our target audience.
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Peter is right, but Peter is wrong.
Games are regarded as “bad” at storytelling because traditional storytelling makes terrible games or gaming moments (see cutscenes).
An interactive game with a reasonable level of freedom can’t surpass a linear, passive medium in *that kind of storytelling*. You, Peter, won’t write that greatest story in a game, even if you go all Kojima with hours long dialogues.
Games shouldn’t tell you stories, but allow you to experience them. The model shouldn’t be linear fiction, but life (although not the real one).
This is what Sum0 was explaining above, and where Peter is right. Too bad he’s so wrong beside it :p
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I’ve got a huge anti-story rant to reel off at some point. It’s not quite as people might expect, however, and I think Molyneux chimes in nicely with it.
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I think he has a point to a degree (and I think Sum0 et all puts it rather well) – though I don’t think it’s so much about the story itself being greater but the way the viewer/player is attached to it. Of course, there’s a danger in that since when confronted with the limitations of story, the first thing many a player will do is seek to break or defy it.
I’m told that a mark of some of the actors/resses famous for being good is their ability to improvise their character. Though how you’d teach a game how to improvise I have no idea.
Additionally, am I the only one wohm the title reminded of that pre-show of Fable 2 with Molyneux started with him going “I have a confession to make: I am a woman.”?
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You can keep your box of toys. Games that breathlessly offer me “choice! sandbox gameplay!” make me roll my eyes nowadays. Sure I can make my own story like (to shamelessly retell Sum0′s story) “I was driving a bike along a bridge in GTA when I flew off the edge on fire and leapt off just as it crashed into a truck and exploded” but it holds no dramatic or narrative weight, so in the end, it’s empty, and I lose my interest.
I really want a game with a good story. I want compelling characters that do compelling things that send me along a compelling narrative. If it’s a good story, I don’t give two shakes if it’s uniquely mine or not.
To me, Call of Duty 4 and Half-Life 2 were much more gratifying experiences than any GTA or Far Cry 2.
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I can see it happening, but as has been said, games have to get out of the mindset of being linear storytelling mediums. They can be, but it really doesn’t let them live up to the potential they’ve got, ie. interactivity. And that doesn’t mean choosing between “saving the kittens” and “selling an orphan’s organs for crack money”. It means giving choices which are all tempting, which all have good and bad sides to them – pretend in FFVII you had to kill Aerith, but that you could choose not to. Then you had to find another way to deal with things (Maybe you couldn’t, and if you didn’t kill her yourself before Meteor hit, the world ended). Just a very basic top-of-my-head example.
Also, bring gameplay into storytelling. Let’s pretend you need to buy time for your main party to escape: you can choose one or two people to leave behind. They stand and fight the enemy until they die; once they do so, you switch to the rest of your party, who have exactly as long as the others lasted to run. The value of their sacrifice varies, and if they fall in 30 seconds it won’t do as much good as if they last for 10 minutes. (And there should be another path too, where they are so hard that they actually survive, leading to a demoralized enemy force, rumors about their hardness, etc. etc.)
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i admit to being somewhat mystified as to why molyneux gets any serious attention these days. his whole comment boils down to “your individual experiences are important to you!” which is kinda obvious.
meaner version: who gave this asshole a copy of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance?
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I think for me, more than anything, the story is what draws me to any game. Not to say that I don’t enjoy a game like Farcry 2 which is just a lot of chaotic destruction and fun, but it would never be a favorite of mine. I don’t think we can even have the same expectations of game storytelling (dynamic) that we have of literary storytelling (linear) either, it is a completely different medium which is much more interactive, and with that there are limitations as well as freedoms.
Something that games can do with stories that would be very difficult almost impossible for literature is to create a story with the world itself, a great example is Fallout 3. For me, the main storyline was mostly a boring, standard fare sort of story, nothing that really drew me in. Son looks for dad, manages to save the world or destroy it, and even then, the breadth of choices were ridiculously limited in terms of good vs. evil. Why would an indifferent/evil son even follow that storyline in the first place? But I digress, the world was the story for me, all the little details that drew me in, and the ability to create your own stories within this world. A family so obsessed with survival that it cannibalized all strangers that managed to find them, Vault experiments gone horribly wrong, sometimes you didn’t even have to see a person to know their story, like the tapes of the son with the father turning into a ghoul. It created a context for people to understand the world they found themselves in, and for me it made Fallout 3 one of the most compelling games I’ve ever played.
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I’d like to direct the assembled company to the Empire: Total War thread over in the forum. Now, I’ll freely admit I’m not telling it well, but the story that is emerging as a collaboration between myself and the game is incredibly engaging, easily on the level of your finest Kotors. And no-one wrote it in advance. This is the magic of gaming, and it’s something that can’t be matched by any kind of intricate scripting.
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The benefit of storytelling in games might be the personalisation that comes with becoming an avatar, but I think that the real storytelling comes afterwards when those personalised stories are shared communally like variations on folktales – at which point, is it really the game’s story or the player’s story? For great story, games need to provide freedom, not scripts.
I think if games are going to generate great stories it’ll come from the interactions of different players within a game-space rather than different experiences of a single-player narrative. Although the obvious retort is that such things are easily spoiled by the ‘lol, whut?!’ crowd, even dickish behaviour can spin into a compelling narrative. ‘Bow, Nigger’ for instance. That might not be ‘story’ in the grand epic sense of something like a Bioware narrative, but such tales are usually much more interesting.
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@Jim I think there’s unnecessary conflict over story in games due to people’s rather definition of what story is. I use it to cover linear and non-linear, scripted and improvised story alike. A rant against scripting is not necessarily a rant against story.
But then PLUS! There is a steamy fight in games today between what I clumsily describe as “sport” games and “story” games. Essentially, Quake 3 as the former, Half-Life as the latter.
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@Kompi:
“Though how you’d teach a game how to improvise I have no idea.”
Well treat the NPCs as actors, and teach them to improvise.
Give them a character, an history (not a story), define by a set of rules and numbers how they would act in certain situations, how they would interact with the surrounding world, and see what happens!
http://aigamedev.com/interviews/stalker-alife
http://tale-of-tales.com/DramaPrincess/wp/
You could probably go away with it, but it *might* end up being slightly Sims-boring.
What we’d need then is a kind of Director that would provoke a couple of interesting events around you, using the available places and characters around.
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@Dan (WR)
Bow Nigger has been invoked. IT IS TIME.
IT IS TIME.
30 days have elapsed. The bats shall be released.
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I’m with you, Matt. Why does everything have to be 100% freeform? I really enjoyed Mount and Blade, but it sure as hell wasn’t for the story!
Yes, technically, I was making my own story as I went along, but it was “man goes to Calradia. He becomes a mercenary. After recruiting a few people with limited personalities he gallops around chasing bandits and hitting them till they fall over. Eventually one of the kingdoms recruits him, and then makes him a Lord. After a mostly successful campaign against their enemies, he retires from adventuring and lives happily ever after. The End.”
Hm. Compelling. It may be *my* story, but I’d enjoy a sweeping, fully voice-acted narrative written by someone else more. I loved KOTOR and I still think HL2 and its episodes were a triumph. The gameplay was excellent, but the storytelling really contributed to my enjoyment.
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What Sum0 and yhancik said. Developers need to to fully exploit the unique characteristics of the medium for video games to advance as an exciting new arena for story telling.
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ooops forgot a link : http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/
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I think atmosphere is more important than story (as in, plot). Looking at my list of favourite games, from Elite onwards, they all nail that sense of place (let’s fact it, Elite had no story whatsover, and even came with a novella in order to give it one). I’m loving Stalker, even though I only have a vague idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing in the greater scheme of things.
P.
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I don’t think that there has to be a division between dynamic and linear storytelling within games, I think that actually has been the problem from the start. There is the main (linear) storyline that you follow until you hit a certain point, then you do 18 hours of side quests, then hit the storyline back up and finish the game. There is no continuity between choices you make in side quests(I use this term loosely) and the overall story. A game with only a sandbox would become stale very quickly.
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I guess I prefer toys to games.
Well said cliffski. That’s why I’ve always liked the Will Wrights and Sid Meiers of the world. They create games and toys, not storybooks with $60 pricetags :D.
With Civ IV, for example, I find myself dreaming up convoluted explanations for the AI’s motives. The subsequent story of my game world, which has its own unique terrain and circumstances, is more exciting than most videogames stories, if only because I created it. I’m sure players of The Sims feel the same way about their games.
Side note: having the AI create situations unique to your game is one of the coolest things. See Tom Francis’ article about his unique AI buddy in Oblivion Nights of the Nine.
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I think atmosphere is more important than story
Team Fortress 2 soundly agrees. Not much of a story, but the atmosphere is absolutely perfect.
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WHOA THERE HOMBRE.
Do your own experiences, your path through the game, not count as a story?
HERE IS A HINT: THEY TOTALLY DO.
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Didn’t the original Elite actually come with a novella bundled in the box?
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your path through the game, not count as a story
It’s again a question of “what to define as a story”.
I guess here Paul meant “pre-written story”, as the one Molyneux is hoping to write one day :p
Hey, to me the “atmosphere” is part of the story too. It’s an unwritten story of your surrounding.
I suppose the “story” of the “anti-story” people is the one about your character. “You will start here, talk to this guy, find that object to unlock that zone, where you will meet this character who will [...] and finally save the world”.
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@yhancik, exactly. See my earlier post. In fact, I’ll repeat it:
And I think it’s the latter rather than the former that Molyneux is getting at. I’m totally with him, but at a discrete distance so no-one thinks we’re together or anything.
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Yes, Bobsy, that’s what I was referring to by my “again”… and then somewhat forgot what you exactly said and ended up repeating it :p
But I couldn’t agree more!
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I like linear games definitly more then sandbox games, I kind of get bored killing prossies in GTA4 so I will just go through the story. I like JRPGS which is just the story and little interaction except moving forward, maybe I’m a bit strange in that regard but most of the great stories I think come from JRPGS especially Final Fantasy(I know what your thinking).
But I can see sandbox gaming, i just don’t think YOUR story will be ever good as godfather was, remeber you have all that emption and all that sub text and all those signs. Is going over a bridge while its exloding really that intelligent as Godfather. No, and no matter what the game can allow you do do it will never reach those heights because a skilled person is not crafting it.
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I think Alpha Centauri’s story and the way it’s handled is well done. It does have an overall narrative, but it fits seamlessly on top of whatever metanarrative you’re unfolding in playing the game. The written text is powerful enough to be interesting and motivating but sparse enough not to impinge on what the rest of the game tells.
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Funny how he still says “computer game” even though he doesn’t make computer games any more. I guess part of him remembers that he used to make good stuff for a good platform.
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the story v. “story” (or the reverse if you like) thing is easily illustrated in the theory of jrpgs vs. wrpgs (i.e. satan v. god)
jrpgs are locked into their stories somewhat like an adventure game. the combat and everything else is grease for the story to slide along.
wrpgs are far more mutable, and in a few rare cases a la ps:t the story and the game are nearly one and the same. how you play determines how much or little you learn.
the actual experiences are probably somewhere in between those two extremes.
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@yhancik
We should totally marry.
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“Didn’t the original Elite actually come with a novella bundled in the box?”
Yup, as mentioned, indeed it did – The Dark Wheel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Wheel) wonder do I still have somewhere? Written by Rob Holdstock of Mythago Wood fame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Holdstock)
I remember turning off the bedroom light and putting my Star Wars soundtracks on full blast to get the full emmersive effect.
P.
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Yup, just to be clear, every game has a story (“Pacman swerved left, just missing Clyde’s downward feint, and dashed off screen. Momentarily, the ghosts were confused…”) but not necessarily a plot.
P.
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All this nonsense can be put aside when sentient ai’s are in control of games narrative. Shame about the robot uprising 2 months later.
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@Bobsy
Ahh RPS can also be the home of FIM, Friendly Internet Men :p
@Heliocentric
hopefully we’ll be able to use what we learned after many years of gaming ;)
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yhancik: We’re all friendly here.
So long as you don’t have the temerity to, you know, like stuff.
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Perhaps it will be in a game. But I’m fairly sure it won’t be one from Molyneux.
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Since I don’t do multiplayer anymore, I gotta have a story to keep me interested in playing the game. If it doesn’t have a campaign/story, I won’t buy it.
My only exceptions are big sandbox games like SimCity, and big 4X’s like Civilization, where you can spend days or weeks playing a single game.
Sins of a Solar Empire was a disappointment in that respect because while they lacked a campaign story, they claimed they were a 4X, and that’s really not the case.
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Elite’s story was rubbish, it was about a pilot who crashed trying to dock with a space station.
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I dunno about Sins being a 4X. I thought it was more like Rise of Nations in space. It does fulfill the four Xs, but it’s not as deep as other games like Civ or Gal Civ, which have more complex diplomacy models and so on.
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@Nick
Ah but the emotional strings that were tugged when the pilot went through the space station and there last breath was what made the game great.
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While allowing the player to explore an environment is a great strength of games, I’m not sure that delivering story through the environment is something exclusive to gaming. For example, take the Road, partly because I’ve just finished reading it, but also because it nicely compares with your Fallout 3 example. The man and the boy’s journey through it is used to reveal a similar (albeit significantly bleaker and more cynical) story to the players exploration of the Wasteland. Of course The Road also contrasts this with the relationship between the man and the boy, which forms the major narrative focus, more so than their actual struggle for survival.
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We all know that the greatest story ever told is, in fact, Doom.
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I’d love for Peter to play Dwarf Fortress.
It may be fugly, and have a learning curve steeper than a cliff face, but as Sum0 says, it’s the epitome of story-generating games.
There’s just so much detail about everything in the game, it can’t help but generate unique stories every time you play.
(I also secretly wish that Peter would fall in love with the game and offer to fund Toady while allowing him full creative control and supplying him with a team of guys to work on graphics and interface design; one can dream)
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I do love a good plot in games: rattling off the obvious examples of stellar storytelling, Deus Ex, Grim Fandango, HL2… But for every well-told, deep, complex plot you have generic stuff like Crysis, poorly implemented and uninteresting plots (Far Cry 2, though I still enjoyed it) or just something that’s far too meandering to follow (F.E.A.R. – I’ve never enjoyed the “audio log” method of exposition, because it essentially stops the action for ten minutes while you listen, else the audio is drowned out by combat).
Games can be so much more than this, if only people would try. Dwarf Fortress (which I keep bringing up) was essentially written as a game to explore stories (in the same vein that Tolkien wrote LOTR to indulge his love of languages). You can engrave images on walls for decoration, and in the early game the descriptions refer to dwarven mythology and history (painstakingly generated along with terrain at the start of a game). But give it a few years, and the images begin to reflect the history of your own fortress – things that happened to you, e.g. “This wall is engraved with an image of a dog striking down a goblin. This refers to the slaying of Hurly Gustenberg by the dog Colin in 359.” It’s not much, but when you experienced the goblin attack of 359 and remember it well, it’s mindblowing. (Boatmurdered’s thousands of images of elephant destruction come to mind.)
So, great plots can be wonderful, but if it’s a choice between a sweeping tale of WW2 again and a dog fighting off five goblin invaders before bleeding to death, I’ll take the latter every time. Words like “emergent,” “procedural”, and basically using that processor in there for something more than pushing polygons.
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@James
I didn’t mean to imply that it was exclusive to gaming, but maybe that it is more possible to deliver a strong environmental narrative in a game. Or maybe I am just reading the wrong books :)
Dwarf Fortress seriously has some of the best story moments in a game, but for most people, they would rather read the stories of other people’s exploits rather than play the game and have them for themselves. I attribute that to a complete lack of playability, even when you know the games mechanics they don’t make sense, there is just no way to justify the spelunking required to navigate its menus. Perhaps Jason Schklar from the previous post could help them out.
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Might as well read “Fable 3 Will Not Meet Design Goals”. I’m so sick of his games that get stuffed full of ambitious features and pushed out the door without a lick of polish.
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Peter Molyneux? Isn’t he that bloke who said World of Goo didn’t deserve to be in the charts? I spit in Peter Molyneux’s eyes!
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Sum0, I agree with you that Dwarf Fortress is excellent in that respect, and it is the one game which has convinced me that it is possible to build detailed and meaningful stories without scripting, or other human driven narrative. However I think Dwarf Fortress stands amongst a remarkably small collection of peers which have actually managed to achieve this.
I was about to argue that through a dynamic, largely machine generated, method, that it would however be impossible to embed layers of symbolism etc. which may be found in more ‘scripted’ situations. However it just occurred to me that this may not be true. After all, how much symbolism in any traditional narrative is added by the author, and how much is added by the reader. Any English Lit folk want to take a crack at assigning some form of symbolism to the elephants in Boatmurdered?
Of course, real life has quite crap narrative structure, as many makers of biographies have discovered.
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“Peter Molyneux? Isn’t he that bloke who said World of Goo didn’t deserve to be in the charts? I spit in Peter Molyneux’s eyes!”
Ah no, that is Peter “EA Sport Simulator ” you are thinking of:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/01/02/peter-moore-wtf-where-the-hell-is-fifa-09-and-other-ruminati/
P.
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The possibility to create a story and make it interactive (thus becoming unique in videogames) shows that VG’s have no boundaries.
The same happened with cinema in the passage from watching fricking trains go to charlie chaplin.
So take away stories you take away the spark of divinity, you condemn videogames to be dope for retard console kids.
Don’t do it, “story” is not boring like in a movie, it’s one thing with interaction (the toys you’re referring to)
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Ugh, please read this before deciding to hate Peter Moore. It’s almost like the guy who wrote the joystiq article didn’t actually read Moore’s statement at all.
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I don’t really have input on the whole games-as-storytelling quandary. I don’t want to get caught up in it.
Instead, I am merely here to point out that this is not the first time Peter Molyneux has said something so nebulous and pseudoprofound as to border on dog-barkingly insane.
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“Give them a character, an history (not a story), define by a set of rules and numbers how they would act in certain situations, how they would interact with the surrounding world, and see what happens!”
Stalker?
To me, there are two types of games I love:
-Story I make (Fallout 3, Deus Ex, etc) where there’s an overarching storyline, but I basically make up the rest of it myself, and…
-Story I live in (Marathon being the best example). In Marathon, you have to save Humanity, there’s no choice, because like a story, it happens to you. However, Marathon’s story was so good it got me into game design in the first place, by having so much plot, character, and setting, that even though I was reading computer terminals I forgot, and got totally wrapped up in this amazingly well written dialogue of a computer discovering sentience.
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It’s kind of funny that Peter Molyneux wants every player to have their own story, when his game Fable 2 locks the player in to experiencing the plot as the writer intended it, in so many places. Shamus Young of Tweny Sided wrote a series of articles about assorted aspects of Fable 2 on his blog. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2105 That’s one of them, do a site search there for Fable 2 to see the rest.
@Gap Gen: Yeah, SoaSE can meet a very loose definition of “4X”, but it’s really paced and scaled much more towards being a slower-paced large scale multiplayer RTS. As you said, the depth just isn’t there compared to Gal Civ et al. You can make the galaxy map huge, but you still hit the unit cap and max out the tech tree after the first hour.
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I am liking Mungrel’s suggestion of dorfs supported by the Molyneux creux.
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Very few people play games for the story. And that’s all well and good, since very few games have decent stories, and those that do are still a long shot away from literature.
And I don’t mind that at all. In fact, I hope the pompous assholes of the world of novels and fine art stay far away from this medium, because they’d ruin it. Things like fiction and art were created to be forms of entertainment, and this holds more true for video games than for anything else. If a video game is not fun, then it has failed no matter how “artistic” it is.
I’m sure that 50 years ago people claimed that the best story would be told in a movie. It wasn’t, but does that really matter?
I highly doubt that video games will ever have the best story or even the best “narrative” experience. Games offer a unique sort of entertainment, and that’s the strength that developers need to focus on.
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Oh, and Peter Molyneux is a [redacted].
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Also, a game will contain the most beautiful picture ever. That game will come out tomorrow and end art design, unless you pretentious art designer assholes send me money!
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Let me advertise a slogan I made up (or heard so long ago, I don’t remember where I picked it up):
“Gameplay should be the story.”
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“Gameplay should be the story.”
Totally. Videogames are not movies. “STORY” is not something as stupid as Kane&Lynch’s, it’s ONE with interaction.. it’s not like warhammer online, some blah that you skip, the story AFFECTS the way you play.
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take the silliest example, an action adventure game. You’re in a point of the game where an officer blocks your way, He’s approaching you to knock you down.
The story at this point would have told you that you’re innocent and that you have to get informations off this guard concerning those who framed you. That’s suggesting the player that you shouldn’t kill the guard, so you should CHANGE the way you interact.. you should fight in a defensive way trying to stop the guy and convincing him that “you should not be enemies but you should work together” (i wonder who takes the reference here). It’s an example of active interaction in story. How can we renounce that for measle toyboxes? videogames WILL end up degraded, if we do.
Btw for more ways into interaction check out my blog ;)
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Perhaps the key is that games should only do something if they can do it well. Too many games have a crap story. If you can’t write a story, then don’t have one. If you are focusing on strategy, focus on that one thing, forget the graphics and the immersion and the story. If you are focussing on graphics, go for it, and don’t waste time trying to hack in a cheap cliched story.
Too many gamers expect all games to have all things, like a shopping list. No wonder so many stories are crap, so many gfx dissapoint, and so much multiplayer sucks.
Game devs should be allowed to say “this is what we do well. forget everything else”, and be taken at their word. Do one thing well, not all things slightly badly.
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@cliffski: I think the reason I liked Gears of War better than Gears of War 2 was that the original had no storyline and no pretenses to it. Gears of War 2 tries to crowbar in a compelling story (something that Epic has NEVER accomplished), and fails so spectacularly that it makes my teeth hurt.
Remember Unreal? The first one? “You are a convict and your prison ship has crashed on an alien planet. Don’t die.” Not a literary revolution. But I was too busy gawking at the huge open spaces and having fun with the wacky-ass dual purpose weapons and marveling at how smart the enemies seemed.
Can’t write immersively? Hell, can you write COMPETENTLY? No? Then don’t try, fail, and pretend like you succeeded. You will look like a monumental idiot. Cliffski’s right, stick to what you know… and, if experience has taught me anything, it’s that narrative is not Molyneux’s forte.
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@cliffski: To be fair, I have to say that the strength of 90ies/”golden age” games is often that they actually succeed at the “shopping list” way of doing games, excelling in every facet possible for a genre.
I don’t really buy into the modern “we have a great storyline, so we had to cut some of the strategic depth” way of gamedesign. Mostly, it’s just lazy or a knee fall towards the impatient audience. I prefer thinking of it as lazy, though, since most players aren’t quite as stupid as publishers think.
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@cliffski: Well said. It makes me ill when I hear some commenter or reviewer say something along the lines of: “the graphics aren’t up to this generation’s standard” or “there’s like NO story” or my personal favorite: “there’s no multiplayer!”
I just want to say, hey asshole, maybe that’s because they didn’t want to sacrifice the game on the altar of your feature checklist. The most tedious games for me aren’t the games that lack these things, but the ones that try and fail to implement them because it was decided in preproduction that the game would need to be multiplayer, need so-and-so graphics tech, or my personal favorite, need “a gripping story” to get approved, as if producing a great story is as simple as producing a dump.
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Cliffsky: there’s no need to FORGET story and focus into one thing. The point is to make story not be a useless appendix to gameplay but one thing with it. To do that you don’t need to be the new Marlowe, just lemme be part of it, don’t babysit me. Many games (mostly consoles) are structured in a wrong way: usually you get cutscenes that reveal exciting things, then you’re told to go kill everyone to get to new exciting things. And so the only interactive part is kill everything in dumb ways. That way stories are useless and games are educationally harmful and degrading.
If what YOU DO is meaningful to the events narrated, ANY story will do wonders. For this reason stories don’t have to be original, it’s the interaction that will make ‘em original, since you’re its artifex. Plus, there’s plenty of sources to take inspiration from.
I doubt Richard Garriott is Henry Fielding, He simply had to reuse arthurian legends and D&D, and mixed into a videogame like ultima7 nobody cares that stories are recycled, because inside a VIDEOGAME everything is still new and fresh.
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Peter Molyneux is a liar and a thief
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What games need are enhancements in terms of AI and even more data in them, so we can have multiple paths to follow, different endings. Games nowadays have that to some amount, but much more is needed.
Multiple solutions to problems are key. Haven’t you hated some games because you thought of a creative solution to a puzzle, but the game forced you to make what the developer thought was right?
AI is key to have realistic NPC, with logical behavior. In that I think that a game of this generation that has amazing AI is The Sims 2 in the way every NPC pursues their own objectives and follow their needs. That’s what other games need to copy.
I also think that there needs to be procedural generated stories which adapt to your actions and let you have freedom.
In the future we should have games that have the perfect balance of scripted and freedom and that will make games the best storytelling form.
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Really, The Sims 2 is one of the best examples of story in computer games. Make a character and be free to play his life how you want.
That’s the maximum in sand box free play toy story telling device.
I can’t wait for what The Sims 3 can make in terms of telling stories with a full neighbourhood and characters with some real personality this time.
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And so the Molyneux shite-machine rumbles into life again.
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Pilouuuu: that’s all crap, man, it’s not really story-telling, plz stop saying nonsense.
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The problem is that story is commonly seen as an element external to gameplay, something taken directly from cinema clichés, a waste of time before having fun, that’s why cliffsky says if you’re not a good writer, just take care of the gameplay, and Rossignol said “just lemme play screw stories”.
It’s a corrupted and superficial insight.
If you’re making a strategy game and you’re good at making strategy mechanics, if you REALLY take care of that you’ll be able to make that gameplay naturally meaningful to story itself, and it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece or even original, the gameplay will make it so.
So to answer both Rossignol and Cliffsky, stories are important to the depth of gameplay, and they don’t have to be complicated like in a novel, just meaningful to gameplay.
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@ (Con)Quests: whaaat?!? What’s crap? TS2 is a powerful story-telling device. Exactly because it’s not scripted.
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IMO story needs scripted drama, not random stuff.
If what you say is true, you can narrate chronologically what happens during a match at PONG and call it a story and even insert MADE UP drama into it.
Doesn’t make sense, though :)
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I don’t want they tell me a story. I preffer to build one myself, thank you
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