Active Storytelling

At 2008’s GDC, I attended a presentation on the storytelling techniques in Bioshock hosted by 2K Games President and Creative Director Kenneth Levine. The focus of the presentation and its subtitle was “Empower Players to Care About Your Stupid Story”. It’s a critical point, especially from where I sit at both the conjunction and divergence of the tabletop and video gaming design disciplines.

Levine mentioned that at one point, as developers, they had about 400 pages of background material for Bioshock. Four hundred! Equally as important, by launch, they had pared that brick down to about ten percent of the original — and bloated — doc size.

Although the initial idea seems like it might not support a whole game, the story in Flower is pretty compelling.I was glad to hear this. This is a great example of subtractive design as applied to story design, and a practical application of understanding the medium. Let’s face it: Many designers really want to write fiction, but the way in the reader reads fiction is emphatically not the way a player plays a video game. So in many cases, when a game touts “immersive story,” what it means is “this script is a goddamn brick, so get ready for some cut scenes.”

Players don’t want that. Well, most players don’t want that. Some players certainly enjoy reading world lore or watching cut scenes, but the important thing to remember is that a game is not a novel. You can’t dump a pile of on-screen print text upon a player and expect him to like it.

To this end, game designers, whether of the tabletop or video game ilk, need to understand how people are playing their games. If you’ve played World of Warcraft, you’ve almost certainly taken a quest — and you’re likely to have skipped the bulk of the quest text and looked at the bottom for, “Yeah, yeah, yeah; bring how many rat pelts to whom, now? And how good is the magic stick you’re offering?” And for all of the content-is-king philosophy at Blizzard, the way the game is designed actively doesn’t want you to read the quest text. You level up by gaining experience points, and your experience points come from killing monsters. In fact, the more quest text you read, the more you’re holding yourself back from playing the game as designed, because that’s time you could be spent killing monsters.

I don’t need any quest text. I’ll kill a hundred of these for you no problem, no NPC motivation necessary.I don’t mean to unfairly indict Blizzard here, because almost everyone’s guilty of this legacy method of storytelling. No one’s found the sweet spot yet, especially in the video game market. A notable few games have achieved a singular storytelling experience, but they’re just that: singular. Braid, for example, and Flower, and my darlings Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. They’re outstanding anomalies, they haven’t become the standard of the medium. Tabletop games are a different sort of beast entirely, as they depend solely on the gamemaster or storyteller running them, but in those cases, the storyteller becomes a surrogate developer (and thus inherit the developer’s responsibilities to storytelling). White Wolf’s “renaissance in gaming” is an early example of this, and though the mainstream gaming tastes have moved back a bit toward system-focused games, no few other titles push story to the forefront, such as In a Wicked Age.

Now, what this all boils down to is the admonition against bombarding players with exposition. They’re players, not passive ingesters of prose blocks scripted by what amounts to a tyrant. They want to play. That’s their role in the equation. They need to participate.

How to accomplish this?

If what you want to do is tell a story, write a story: Let’s get this out of the way first. There’s no shame in telling a story. It’s a noble calling. And if what you want to do first and foremost is tell, well, write it. There’s little interaction in telling, so don’t shoehorn your story into a format that requires interaction to be vital.

Players want to feel clever and empowered and have the action revolve around them.Destroy, destroy, destroy: This is my infant daughter’s mantra, and it’s a good guideline for story in games as well. Details are cool. They’re what make little “tokens” of memory that players associate with playing the game. Too many details are like that junk drawer in your kitchen, though. They’re clutter. They keep you from getting to the detail that’s really potent or poignant. Throw them out. Keep only what you need to tell the story. You’ll feel positively Orwellian in your condensation of the story to its vital elements.

Let the world narrate: You don’t need bricks of text, third-party exposition, or reams of world history. What’s important is here and now. What do the players discover with their senses? Do they see a unique piece of art, hear a moving piece of music, or witness some stirring event? These are the sorts of current-event details that a game experience thrives upon, but they allow a player to act or react to them. Look at the art direction in Bioshock. Listen to the little fragments of sound that you discover as you move throughout the world. These entries in the “world scrapbook” tell the story of the world without thrusting themselves unavoidably in the player’s face. Vampire’s creation myths, are another great example of this. They’re flavor, tantalizing bits of maybe-history that pepper the world without assaulting the characters with a history book full of details they don’t need.

Players need to interact: With the world in a video game or with the world and each other in a tabletop RPG or MMO, the whole point is that the players can do stuff. Let them do it! The story goes on the back burner any time a player wants to do something cool. This isn’t to say the story is unimportant — it’s very important — but if it’s the most important part of the game, well, you need a word processor and not dice or a game engine. Without the players, you don’t have a game.

Players want to extract, solve, overcome, and be cool: As above, let them. Let them pull one of those interesting details about the world or story out of their encounter. This way, you’re not just ramming story down their throats, you’re giving them rewards for interacting. Maybe an individual overcome in a combat challenge holds a vital clue. Maybe an object the players investigate rewards them with a unique new ability or a bit of understanding.

Ultimately, the story of a game is the vehicle by which its purpose is communicated. You need some story there to knit the characters together and to give them a goal to accomplish. Any more than that and you’re forcing them into the role of passive consumers.

~ by jachilli on 25 July 2009.