Movie vs TV storytelling

Traditionally game story telling usually uses a film model of storytelling - there is one big overwhelming foe to fight, and the player's character (or characters) develop until such time as the can challenge foe is a suitably dramatic location.

The recent project I was on (that just got canned) was a fairly traditional 3rd person action game. Now, when development started there was an assumption right from the start that we'd just be using the same old method of storytelling: here's all the cutscenes laid out at the beginning, let's just string some gameplay together to link them up.

There has to be something better than that.

Id like to see more games move to something more akin to the television model used in series like those produced by Joss Whedon. What frequently happens in his series is that each season there will be a group of episodes at the beginning that just establish characters. Foreshadowing of the future BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) starts to take place with the main characters encountering minions performing tasks that will be part of the overall plan, until the BBEG is revealed.

The BBEG wins a few battles to unsettle our heroes/heroines (now that's a revolutionary concept in games, and I know - it's hard to pull off without disenfranchising the player) until the heroes come to the climactic battle.

But in between the main story arc episodes there are numerous 'filler' episodes that take the characters away from this plot and break it up.

New locations are added every season to the basic group of sets that have been built for the show, increasing the variety of locations that can be used.

I think this could serve as a much better model for episodic content, with player's downloading the equivalent of a season, rather than an episode. It would contain a new BBEG for the player to fight, a new set of 'filler' episodes that could be thrown around (ideally in a random order, but I've got more details of that system to come), and slowly add new locations, while still keeping the story around those used previously.

Just about to finish Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass

Almost finished Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS. It's the first game in ages that I've come close to finishing, but that final slog is pretty hard. Not in an "oh my god, I'm so crap at playing this" way. Hardly that.

But I've found myself asking "do I really want to keep going with this just to see a couple of boss sequences, and a cut scene".

The ending of games always seems to be a disappointment. Flashy movie then it's all over.

What I'd like to see with game stories

I have a thing for procedurally generated content, which seems a bit odd as a designer. I don't want to sit there and nut out how every little detail of something work (although I can do that, and am pretty good at it), but I love the idea of giving the rules for how something should work.

I was having a conversation today about the Sims, and how that element of player driven narrative (which is done almost done at an abstract level) has not been carried through into other game genres.

I really need to sit down and have a good look at Dwarf Fortress soon and have a look at what that does with its unfolding story, as it sounds like the kind of thing that I am very interested in.

There's a great quote on the Gamasutra site with DF's programmer Tarn Adams about game story.

"It was partially inspired by our repeated experiences with plots in video games. We never really wanted to write a plot, and a lot of them seemed like they could be generated by a computer. So we thought about breaking stories down into core elements, and working with those instead. You'd be very hard-pressed to capture really beautiful symbolism or an advanced writing device like that with a random generator, but there are very few game stories where that would be an issue."

Exactly!

Well. I've got a bit of free time.

Just got called into a meeting yesterday to be told that our project was canned so I've got some free time on my hands.

Just thought to myself "what should I do", so I started a blog!

Just in time for easter.