Quest to Nowhere

Good Writing is not the Future of Gaming

To say that good writing is the future of video games is, I think, a bit sort sighted. Video games have generally had relatively good writing, which has really gotten only better over the years. There has been a jump recently in the quality of writing, but it’s not because of game studios hiring good writers.

The problem with writing in video games has generally been that writers have traditionally been brought on board to work on a game toward the end of its development. And are tasked with writing a story that ties together everything the game designers and developers have made. Only in the past few years have studios begun to have writers on the team from the beginning, so that the story of the game is developed alongside the game’s development.

This has of course greatly improved the quality of writing in the games where this happens (ie: Portal 1 and 2, the Mass Effect series, and Skyrim.) And this is something other studios are going to take notice of, especially as the games that handle writing this way sell very well.

But the future of games is not in good writing, but in good storytelling. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s an important subtlety. Writing is very important in traditional mediums like books, movies, TV, comics, etc., because these are generally passive mediums where you as the consumer of it have not effect on what is going to happen, while video games are an interactive medium, and require constant input from the player for something to happen.

And so whilst video games are being used now to tell the story a writer came up with, the real potential of the medium is in the player creating their own story while they are playing. For example, maybe you built an amazing structure in Minecraft only to see it destroyed by some creepers. Or maybe you had a really great run in Call of Duty where you managed to sneak into the enemy’s base, steal their flag, and then capture it at your base without being seen by anyone to win the match. Or perhaps whilst wandering the land of Skyrim you encountered some thugs battling a dragon, and after fighting off the dragon with them they turn on you and kill you. These are all examples of stories created not by a writer, but by the player’s interactions with the game itself.

Now this is not to say that video games don’t need writers, but rather that the art of writing for a video game will for the most part move away from creating a narrative for the player to follow, but will instead become more about writing to support the interactions the player has during the game. So things like writing the history of the game’s world up until the point the game starts, writing the dialogue of non-player characters to respond to players differently based on the actions the player undertakes while playing, and things like that.

There will still be a place for games with a set narrative like Portal, Mass Effect and Uncharted, but the real potential of this interactive medium is to make the player an active participant in creating the story they are playing. This is because these stories are much more powerful and more meaningful to a player, since it was their unique experience and their unique story not just something everyone also experienced.

The Next Elder Scrolls Game Shouldn’t Have a Main Story

It’s been a few weeks since Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim got released, and since then I’ve wanted to write a blog post about it. But every time I tried to come up with something to write about, I couldn’t really come up with anything to write about. I think this might be because all of its flaws, and everything it does right are fairly obvious, so trying to talk about anything often seems like I would just be retreading ground someone has already covered before.

Now the thing I’ve noticed, from not only my own life but also from listening to podcasts where they’ve talked about Skyrim, is that when you get two or more people together who have been playing the game what they end up talking about are their experiences playing the game. The really interesting weapon they got after doing this mission, or the Dwarven ruin they stumbled upon when they got lost whilst looking for something else, or how they took down a dragon with the help of their horse.

The game has been made so that everyone will have a completely different experience playing the game, and because there is so much stuff different players will often encounter things that other player might not have seen or would have never seen. Which is really one of the things that make the game feel great, when you discover something it feels like you are actually discovering something. Which often times leads you to wander around looking for stuff rather than doing quests, and especially just completely ignoring the main story quest line.

Now this finally gets us to the crux of this whole post, which is that this game doesn’t really need a main story line of quests. They might be cool quests to do, but it more often than not feels like I’m being pulled away from what I want to do in order to do something that I have to do.

So what I’d like to see in the next Elder Scrolls game is no main story line of quests, but still have a main story line of quests. What I mean is that the main story line quests shouldn’t be like they are in Skyrim, or were in Oblivion, rather the player should be free to do whatever they want to do and the story adapts to fit that. Don’t make the player go to the main story, have the main story come to the player.

For instance instead of looking into why dragons are coming back to Skyrim I decide to go join the Mage’s College in Winterhold. While doing missions there perhaps I start to get information related to why the dragons might be returning, and that might cause me to seek out people who might know more about it. Or to take an example mission from the game, perhaps I don’t meet up with the informant person who would have taken me to a dragon burial site to see the dragon get revived, perhaps instead while running a mission for the Mage’s College they send me to, or near, one of these sites and I see this happen as if it were a random event occurring in the world.

This more organic way of telling the story would allow all the players of the game to experience the game’s “main story,” but much like the rest of the game how it occurred would be different for each player. Additionally it would make the whole world feel more realistic, as if things were happening all around you even though you aren’t there. This is sort of not how things aren’t really now, since if I stop doing a quest line nothing happens to progress that quest line’s story without me the player doing it. This is nice as the player since I can do whatever mission I want at any time and know that I can always stop and go back to it if I’d rather go do something else, but it does from time to time break the immersion of the game. It is especially so when it’s an apparently critical and time sensitive moment.

I think also this more organic way of storytelling is more in line with how people play these games anyway, and that way of playing is definitely something the developers designed for with Skyrim. Since they made the quest system flexible enough to know where you had been and what places you had cleared out, and to send you hadn’t already been to or move the item you need to get to a different location (I’m not entirely sure how it works but this is my general understanding of what it can do.)

So it seems to me that with Skyrim they are already moving in this direction of making the game more about supporting player exploration, and players doing whatever they want to do at a given time, and I think that having the main story adapt to what the player is doing is the next logical step for the Elder Scrolls games.

The Character in My Head vs. the Character in the Game: Objective Storytelling in Videogames

Upon finishing Batman: Arkham City I found myself wondering how it was that I felt like Batman when playing the game, which further led me to wondering how it was that in other games with objective storytelling I often didn’t feel like the character I was playing as.

To quickly explain what I’m talking about storytelling in games is generally either subjective or objective. Subjective storytelling is when the player is the character, which usually means that the player is creating the character and the actions and choices they make are dictated by the player. For example Fallout 3, what your character does and says during the game are determined by what the player chooses to do, and as such they tend to put themselves in the shoes of their character which makes them feel that the story is about them.

Objective storytelling is when the player is not the character. So in Arkham City you aren’t Batman, well you are in so far as you control him at certain times and in certain ways, but what he does in regards to the story is not at all effected by your actions. You can’t make Batman kill the Joker in a cut scene, for example.

So what is it about objective storytelling games like the Arkham games and the Uncharted games that make me engaged and immersed in the story, and feel like the character, even though I’m not, whilst other games like Resistance 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution don’t?

It seems to come down to two things:

1. The player needs to understand the character they are playing as.
2. The character has to always feel like the character especially in the game mechanics.

Using Arkham City or even Arkham Asylum as an example, the player is probably coming into the game with a basic understanding of who Batman is, even if they are not the introductory sequences of both games help to establish this understanding for the player. This covers criteria number one.

In regards to criteria number two, you as the player are never able to make Batman do anything that Batman wouldn’t be able to do or do something that would go against your understanding of who Batman is. For example you can’t kill anyone in either game, because Batman would never kill anyone. Additionally you can’t use a gun, even though they are plentiful at times, because Batman would never use a gun.

The gameplay mechanisms of the game reinforce your understanding of who the character is, so that there is never an instance where the Batman character you have an understanding of in your head is different from the one being presented to you either through a cut scene or through the gameplay.

An example of where these two criteria weren’t followed was in Red Dead Redemption. Here the trouble was that the player was presented with John Marston, and they gave you an understanding of who he was and what he was like. And so if you played the game sticking to how the character was presented to you, you never had a problem since the character in your head was the same as the one on the screen.

When I played I understood Marston as a guy who had a checkered past, which he was trying to get away from, but now had caught up with him so he was going to need to deal with it without falling back too much into his old ways. This worked with the sort of narrative that the game was trying to tell, but if you played the game as someone who killed everyone they saw you were presented with a John Marston in those cut scenes that was not reflective of your actions through the game’s gameplay. This breaks the story for the player, and their immersion while playing.

There are some other things I want to touch on in regards to this topic of objective storytelling in games, but I think I’ll handle them in another post so as to keep this one concise.