GCDC: Storytelling in Games, or "Why It Mostly Sucks"

I never met a game story I didn't groan about sooner or later, a sentiment pretty resoundingly echoed by industry wordsmiths Bob Bates and Ken Ralston at yesterday's "Storytelling Panel." Bates started out writing text adventures for Infocom in 1986, went on to co-found Legend Entertaiment (Eric the Unready, Wheel of Time, Shannara) and more recently, Unreal 2 (2003) and Spider-Man 3 for the PS2 and Wii. Ken Ralston you may know as either the guy who worked on pen and paper RPGs like Paranoia, RuneQuest, and the D&D Arabian Nights campaign setting...or the design lead on Morrowind and Oblivion.

That's Ken Ralson in the middle, and Bob Bates on the right

Here's a kind of synopsis of the parley between Ralston and Bates (note I'm paraphrasing, except for sections with direct quotes):

Ken: Hates the way game stories tease deeper subtext then fail to pay off on all the choices.

Bob: Wants to push characters to do things they wouldn't want to do, but thinks it's unfair to make players do things they might not otherwise. "You have to support stories with appropriate content."

Ken: Most games celebrate boyish hero fantasies, which directly conflicts with a desire to have more complex stories. (Me: Think Raymond Feist's fun but puerile Riftwar series, versus China Mieville's "The New Weird" Perdido Street Station -- we'll see more complex stories in games eventually, but only after we expand beyond a core audience of aggressive, adolescent males.)

Bob: Looks for ways to accent moments of character pain or dilemma to increase psychological tension.

Ken: "Can I say how much I despise using cinematic techniques in games?" (He admits to admiring them when they're well done, though says that's a rarity.) He'd rather use mini-cutscenes for small, dramatic moments without dialogue, e.g. a five second cutaway as a response to something happening in the environment. Imagine your character walking into a bar and doing something, say ordering a particular drink, then -- dynamically, not static -- someone at the bar reacts to your choice and the camera gives you a quick 1-2 second glimpse or draws your attention to the reaction. "I want to use it as a tool to create ambiguity."

Bob: In response to the question "How do we convey author-intended ideas reliably to players?" Bates responded "We're hosed!" He doesn't see any current techniques as satisfactory, though he admits it's still largely a matter of granularity, i.e. game world's simply aren't sophisticated enough under the surface and intuitively simple enough at the interactive layer. "I want to build the story into the world so it's discovered by the player."

On interactive dialogue? "It sucks," said Bates and Ralston in unison. Ralston relayed his experience crafting Morrowind's "hypertext" interface, noting he initially thought he was creating a brilliant hypertext novel, but in hindsight views it as something of a disaster.

"Hierarchical dialogue trees really suck," added Ralston. When the moderator brought up Bioware's Mass Effect and players' ability to interrupt conversations to produce alternative interactive dialogue, Ralston gave the concept the thumbs down, calling it effectively a "joy buzzer." Bates expanded on Ralston's Bioware criticism by suggesting emotive responses (think the monotonous dialogue trees in Knights of the Old Republic) are too non-specific, and often rely on unrealistic, hyperbolic caricatures of personality types to lock down a persona.

At one point Ralston leapt up to illustrate the way dialogue currently works in games, waving his arm up and down rapidly to suggest sawtooth-style input/output (as you're moving around in a game) which switches to a slow, rhythmic, dull pulse when dialogue interrupts the otherwise manic game flow.

Ken: "I think you have to pick big wrong ideas and focus on them. If story and character sucks, fall back on other ideas like setting, theme, artifacts. I love the richness of ambiguity."

Bob: "What passes for story today is just revealed back-story. You can provide context, but it's fundamentally boring. What's interesting is showing characters who change over time." He disagree with Ralston sharply on ambiguity, saying he doesn't like ambiguous characters. "The more specific the translation of the author's ideas to the player's experience, the better."

On their trade secrets:

Ken: Played the Xbox 360 BioShock demo and at first thought the art subtitles (where, when you move over a banner, you get a subtitle for what's written on the banner) were a terrible use of interactive text...until he stumbled on one that told a story and when he moved over it, the interactive text read simply "propaganda." He loved this.

Bob: Theme is king. "What are the thematic elements that drive the game? Stories should be distributed all across the environment in many different ways and in extremely small chunks." (Not in cutscenes or long blocks of text.) "Objects, art, etc. should tell the story naturally."

Okay, gotta run...Molyneux (Lionhead), Eggebrecht (Factor Five), Capps (Epic), and Daglow (Stormfront) on the "Best Selling Games Panel" coming up!

[GC Developers Conference]

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