
Video Games Are Better Without Stories - mimbs
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/?single_page=true
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csense
For the most part, early games dumped you directly from the title screen into
the gameplay. They had a few paragraphs in the manual explaining that some bad
guy's kidnapped the princess, and it's time for the chosen hero to beat up the
bad guy's army, rescue the princess and save the world. Most of the people
didn't read it.

This made the games that attempted to tell a more detailed story stand out
from the crowd and develop as a distinctive genre.

Nowadays games feel as if they have to give you ten minutes of cutscenes for
every twenty minutes of gameplay. Games are a great artistic medium for
telling stories. The problem is that games that aren't in story-heavy genres
feel a need to pretend that they are. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
is a great example of a modern game with a minimalist approach to its use of
tutorial and cutscene elements.

So today, games that take a minimalist approach to storytelling are the ones
that stand out from the crowd.

It's hard to build a game that's fun but focuses solely on narrative. Heavy
Rain did a great job at this, but a lot of games fail.

JRPG's are the genre that gets as far as possible toward a storytelling focus
without totally sacrificing gameplay. For a recent example, Persona 5 is a
flawlessly executed example of a game that tightly integrates story and
gameplay (although a full appreciation of the game's literary depth is
impossible without some knowledge of Japanese culture and tropes).

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piptastic
I don't think the title "Video Games Are Better Without Stories" is true.

The premise of the article seems to be slightly different than the title: that
traditional mediums can tell stories better than video games. Which seems
true, or at least.. has been true so far.

Personally I think video games can tell stories differently (not better or
worse) than movies/books. They can do a much better job of putting you in the
story and actually feeling something. The author uses the example of Bioshock,
but really that's a poor choice for his thesis. Bioshock wasn't using the
gaming medium to tell a story, they were using a story to add to a video game.
Which was great, it worked very well to add to the action and became
critically acclaimed (which seems to me to prove the title of the article
wrong). But the story was just tacked on to the game, the game wasn't there to
tell that story.

There are a few good "games" that are really just a story in a game setting.
Here's a couple that I've seen:

Firewatch -
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/383870/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/383870/)
\- Uses a mystery setting to tell a story. It seems like video games (at least
first person ones) are constrained in a lot of ways to use mystery settings to
tell stories. I've played this one and can attest it is pretty good and you
actually feel involved.

Emily is Away -
[http://steamcommunity.com/app/417860](http://steamcommunity.com/app/417860)
\- This one is an interactive instant messaging story, so very nostalgic for
our crowd. However, it's not as interactive as it necessarily seems. Which is
why I consider it a story in a game setting. I haven't actually played this
one yet, but I've had it in my "wish list" on steam for a while until I'm in
the right mood for it. However, it's free to play so you can try this one
yourself without anything but a time committment.

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FrozenVoid
Video games are interactive stories where the editor is you: so there is some
potential for a great story, it won't be something film-like, more like a
animated life diary of virtual character. People usually don't play games "for
the story", they see it as atmospheric bonus for the game mechanics: something
like background music they wouldn't want to focus their time on, or be forced
to run down the storyline the 124th time just to get the gameplay rewards. The
problem is inherent in video games being a competitive, goal-oriented
environment where repetitive, constructed stories and art are just immersion
decorations for the gameworlds. Obtrusive stories forcing the player to
"rewatch the film again" detract from the flow of gameplay and actually make
the players treat the story as sort of wasted effort(interruption in gameplay,
e.g. cutscenes, dialogues, infodumps) that makes the game less
fun/cohesive/natural.

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anon1253
Being a huge fan of the genre of "interactive narratives", I have to disagree.
Games like Gone Home, Life is Strange, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, Deus Ex,
and others have had a profound impact on me. The author doesn't seem to make a
compelling point why they would be better as books or movies. I haven't really
been able to derive a more coherent argument from the article than "they're
worse because they're worse, so they should not be games". I think that is a
bit harsh on the incredible achievements of the games that painstakingly build
an interactive narrative on a medium that is both technically and artistically
extremely challenging. Take Mass Effect for example, to me the whole franchise
has been one of the most successful science-fiction stories ever. It rivals
Star Trek, Star War, and The Expanse. Especially since Mass Effect came out
during a period where Hollywood had pretty much given up on the genre as a
whole. Mass Effect constructs this beautifully detailed and coherent universe
set in a future where mankind discovers advanced technology from an ancient
race. This propels mankind into a new era of exploration, conflict and
intrigue. Te reason why Mass Effect "works for me", besides the "world
building", is that you have the ability to construct a secondary narrative on
top of the one presented by the game itself. You are allowed, and encouraged,
to make decisions and reflect upon them. While it's all arguably superficial
and closed-world, the moment you immerse yourself /in the character/ it offers
something very few books and movies can: the ability to guide the story, and
become a "person" in a complex world. Then again, I'm biased…but so is that
author it seems.

~~~
cableshaft
I'm a game designer and a hobbyist writer, and I traditionally have had a
terrible time of putting stories into my designs...but yeah, there's some
really fun interactive narrative / rpg games out there and I don't think the
author has bothered to give them a try (he's only focused on the recent
'walking sim' genre in the article).

Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa, Persona 4 and 5, Life is Strange... all really
great, and that's just what I've played in the last year. I've already got
Nier Automata on deck for whenever I finish Persona 5.

I also tried playing Steins;Gate this year, one of the more influential
graphic novel games, but I'm having a harder time getting into that one (I
already saw a good chunk of the anime, so the game feels like a major
downgrade visually).

The multiple path/ending thing is something books and films have never done
terribly well. Clue is the most effective and successful movie that has
attempted multiple endings, and even that could only provide 3 ~5 minute
endings to an otherwise static (but really fun) movie.

Meanwhile quite a bit changed in my playthrough of Life is Strange based on my
choices (although still not quite as much as I would have liked, certain plot
points couldn't be altered), and I got 3 different endings in Persona 4
Golden, with each of the endings leaving some of the mysteries left unanswered
(I haven't gotten the 'true' ending yet).

~~~
mcphage
> I don't think the author has bothered to give them a try

The author is Ian Bogost, a veteran game designer, developer, and and critic.
Check out his biography:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bogost#Bibliography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bogost#Bibliography)

~~~
cableshaft
Ah, Ian Bogost. Yeah, I'm familiar with him. Professional critic, seems to
turn just about everything he writes into the equivalent of literary
criticism; full of vocabulary but lacking meaning and authenticity.

Also obsessed with 'games as art pieces or commentary' and not for fun and
entertainment. Two examples: Cow Clicker, a commentary on human's instinctual
responses to Skinner Box design, and A Slow Year, a game about 'observing'
where one of the mini-games has you drink coffee while staring at a window,
which how that won awards is beyond me.

It's working great for him, I wish I had half the success he's had, and I do
read his work from time to time, but we definitely don't have the same
approach to games. He spends most of his time thinking about academia and
politics, while I prefer to spend my time thinking about interesting mechanics
and making things fun.

I'd say both are important, and before he came around his side wasn't really
out there at all, so I'm glad he's around, but it's not surprising we have
different opinions on the matter.

~~~
mcphage
> I'd say both are important, and before he came around his side wasn't really
> out there at all, so I'm glad he's around, but it's not surprising we have
> different opinions on the matter.

I certainly don't always (often?) agree with him, either, but I do expect he's
at least _familiar_ with what's going on, especially in regard to game
narratives.

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, he most likely is, although it's certainly difficult to keep up to date
with all games out there. There's just so damn many of them nowadays. I still
haven't gotten around to playing the highly acclaimed _Gone Home_ he talks
about in his article myself, for instance, and I've stopped trying to keep up
with most mobile or Steam releases.

And my backlog of games I actively want to play is at least 20 games long at
this point, and then I've got 50 more that own but have barely played, but not
actively wanting to play (maybe eventually, when/if I play the others).

I mainly made that comment without realizing who the author was. I'm sure he's
at least heard of games like Phoenix Wright and Life is Strange, even if he
hasn't been able to play them.

------
Latty
I feel like the author had a point they were trying to make in this article,
but it ended up being a complete mess that just comes across as stupid.

This idea that games are just cheaply emulating hollywood is just wrong. Games
can and do tell stories that just don't work in film or books, and those
stories are valuable. Games can use interactivity to make a story more
personal and give the player investment and ownership.

The article essentially ends by saying that games should focus on mechanics
over story. The same argument has been made before and is just a bad argument.
Subtle uses of interactivity can be effective just as subtle uses of the
visuals in a film can be effective.

~~~
rfz
> I feel like the author had a point they were trying to make in this article,
> but it ended up being a complete mess that just comes across as stupid.

Agreed. Also using Doom and Bioshock in what seemed to be the same comparison,
is pretty mindblowing.

------
namlem
I think that's often true of more traditional attempts at storytelling in
games. I would say that the emergent stories in games like Civilization or
Dwarf Fortress are more compelling that the written stories in most games.
However, there are some games that really do a great job of leveraging the
interactive medium for telling a story. Undertale is one that comes to mind.
Of course, actually making a game like that is far more difficult and time
consuming, since you're essentially writing a huge branching story where each
path the player can take is still cohesive and makes sense.

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mixedCase
I'd love to know what games the author has played in the last decade.

Gone Home was nearly universally hated outside of media outlets, and is hardly
a game in the first place; so it's interesting he brings it up as a shining
example.

~~~
actuallyalys
Gone Home was far from universally hated. Certainly, there's a vocal crowd of
people who hated it, but it has a 7/10 on Steam and a 4.5/5 rating on Itch.

~~~
mixedCase
It does have a 5.4 user score on Metacritic, and the reviews marked as "most
helpful" on Steam are mostly negative. I will say though that it surprises me
the game is not rated lower on Steam given the Metacritic score. Probably
related to the fact the game released before the introduction of Steam
reviews, and most people unhappy with it never ended up leaving a review
there.

Itch is predominantly a platform the indie dev scene and game journalists use,
and that was the crowd that liked it.

From the other popular "walking simulator" games, the Stanley Parade seems to
be the most well-received one.

~~~
mcphage
> It does have a 5.4 user score on Metacritic

User scores on sites like Metacritic are completely useless in understanding
how popular a game is or isn't.

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Grue3
Procedurally generated stories. This is where video games can have an upper
hand over other media. Dwarf Fortress is doing it right.

