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| | Analysis: (Press Any Key to Skip This Article)
by Andrew Vanden Bossche
| | | | | September 30, 2009 | | | [World of Warcraft's quest texts violates the storytelling tenet of 'show, don't tell' in almost every way -- in this opinion column, writer Andrew Vanden Bossche looks at what WoW's story could learn from games even less narratively-driven.]
About 30 levels into World of Warcraft, I realized that I did not need to read two paragraphs of text to justify killing twenty specific woodland creatures. It was at this point that I realized something crucial: in these two paragraphs, the only words that held any interest for me were “kill” and “woodland creatures.” It was very liberating to know that aside from the very few quests that tied into a larger narrative, I wasn’t missing anything at all.
Video games have a complicated relationship with narratives. Some games do just fine without any story at all. Other games make story their main focus, while others use it as convenient way to glue together the disparate elements of a game into a cohesive whole.
Meanwhile, the video game community is caught between the two extremes. On the one hand, we ask for video games to be have more sophisticated narratives, but on the other hand, we’re frustrated by stories that drag us along and break up the game’s rhythm. Getting the story across without killing the mood is the greatest challenge to narrative gameplay, so it’s no wonder that there are plenty of games that drop the whole thing altogether.
It wasn’t always the case, but it’s quite mandatory nowadays for cutscenes and story segments to be skippable. While I would never call for a return to the heinously obnoxious past where we were forced to watch the same 15-minute movie every time we failed to defeat the boss we saved immediately before, when story is considered skippable it probably doesn’t belong in the first place.
We want compelling stories in our games, but we also want them to not forget their chosen medium in their quest to hold our attention. Some games let the world speak for itself rather than putting words in its mouth. In writing, it’s important to be efficient with words. Some games create gorgeous environments without any at all, while others drown themselves in listless text that players don’t bother to read and designers don’t expect them to.
Who What When Where Why
If learning to play a video game is like learning to live in another world, then narrative is particularly helpful since it provides a framework with which to understand it. Simple games like Tetris don’t need to require anything more than basic geometric patterns to convey what’s going on, while more complicated games like Doom use a huge number of images to convey everything from switches to monsters to helpful items to dangerous floors.
Doom is virtually plotless, but the game world is very strong both when it comes to conveying what the player is supposed to do and at providing an emotional experience. Doom terrified a generation of children who grew up playing the game, and the grisly violence and grotesque monsters were a large part of its success. The imagery of Doom ensures from the moment that you start playing that killing monsters is exactly what you’re going to do, and something you want to do, since the creatures in the game are both repulsive and dangerous.
Doom was a successful game because it delivered exactly what it promised. Doom is a terrible example of a good story, but it is a fantastic example of how world design, from the pathways of the level to the imagery and sound effects convey the game’s atmosphere. Doom is the video game equivalent of a perfectly executed B horror movie. It’s not just a successful game, but one that delivers thrills, no matter how cheap they may be.
The World vs. The Story
Narrative is optional for videogames, but world building is not. In other words, Tetris doesn’t need a story, but you can’t have Tetris without the blocks. In fact, many games are recognized for creating a high level of excellence in this respect alone, such as the frantic visual and aural experience of Rez. Videogames straddle the line between narrative and non-narrative art.
We can say that narrative starts at zero and is added as it becomes required. Since every game has some kind of title, it might be more accurate to adjust that number to one, but even a simple title like Asteroids may be all that’s needed to bring life to floating images on a screen.
This isn’t to say that narrative (or world design, for that matter) should exist only to explain to players what they’re supposed to do. But just as every good writer knows to cut unnecessary words, the same should apply to games. A common mantra in creative writing classes is "show, don’t tell". Which even a game like Doom does, and even if it’s horror film camp, does so much with imagery alone. Players will become at worst frustrated and at best bored with extraneous narrative.
What sort of experience is the game supposed to create? How can dialogue or text help this process? How will text or dialogue be better than any other medium for creating this experience? This last question is the most important, since it’s not enough to just tell a story. A story should be read, so if it’s told in a way that players will ignore or skip (or wish they could ignore or skip) it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is.
Fat Games>
If there’s one game that really puts the flab on its narrative, it’s World of Warcraft. WoW’s quest text is like some sort of gaming appendix that the designers feel needs to exist but completely oversteps its requirements. There is simply no need to read two to three paragraphs about why you should be killing woodland animals, especially when endgame boss encounters central to the storyline might not have that much text.
If it isn't being used to enhance the experience, it simply doesn't belong. If players skip the story, the designers have failed. Players don't skip story because they hate stories. They skip it because the story's bad or because it interrupts what they're doing.
WoW's quest text is compensating for the fact that the monsters are simple and the encounters with them are often difficult to distinguish from others except for the differing models. When everything from a dog to a dragon behaves the same way, it’s hard to find them interesting. But rather than have the monsters themselves behave in an evocative or unique manner, the player is then supposed to imagine the qualities of the monster he then goes off to fight. This happens often when what a player reads in quest text isn’t reflected in the actual game world.
Page to Stage
Making the world come to life requires a different approach, one that has been successfully executed more than once in WoW itself. For example, there’s a mine full of babbling prospectors who have gone insane from an evil god beneath the earth that constantly whispers insidious things to players in the area. This is conveyed from word bubbles from the miners, and private messages from the god in the player’s chat.
Because all the text comes in through the game’s chat screen, you aren’t forced to read it to continue. It happens as an organic part of the world rather than something you sit down to read. This is writing that doesn’t interrupt gameplay and is a far more vivid scene than what could ever be found in a snippet of quest text, removed from the rest of the game. Rather than making the player read about something, this brings the event to life.
The problem is fitting it into the game. With videogames, less is more. Text and cutscenes stick out awkwardly when they don’t fit. Of course, context is everything. While Metal Gear’s cutscenes are infamous for straining even the patience of fans, it’s an expected aspect of the game. VNs are also nothing but scrolling text with still images, but they still manage to captivate their audience.
Rather than feeling that story is a burden, it should be celebrated and integrated as fully within the game experience as possible. If that means cutting what doesn’t fit, that’s fine. Story isn’t measured by the pound, but by how much it impacts the player.
[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which hasn’t been updated for an embarrassingly long time, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com] | | |
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In FPS games, the player is running around shooting things, constantly moving in twitch-gameplay style. Making the player pause and stop to read text or watch a cut scene means the player stops moving, so this should be a no-no.
In Adventure games, text or long conversations (man, remember The Longest Journey? More like The Longest Conversation, ha ha) is a little more acceptable, but still should be kept to a minimum, since the player is there for not just the story, but the puzzle-solving.
In MMOs, what is the player there for? Social interaction and epic, immersive experiences. Part of WoW's quest text is limited by the technology (if all that text were audio, imagine how many DVDs the installation would be), but it fails because it breaks immersion. It's hard to imagine that my Orc Hunter would stop and read anything, even if the text is intended to be speech. I'm still reading and I have to stand there to read it. It slows me down. All I want is a quest to make the grind less bothersome. Story in MMOs should be told with mood and an active world, not with blah, blah, blah.
The problem is that some games have taken the concept of story way too far. Story should be a reward for reaching a part of the game or completing a task, not a punishment, and rewards are best when they are short and sweet. At best, players should be excited when they get to a story node because they want to take a break and learn more. At worst, the player is given so much story (Mass effect, cough cough) that they stop playing the game.
I stopped playing Mass Effect after two hours because I was sick of so many conversations. They ceased to be a reward and became a chore. To make a big world, not all the NPC's have to have a story. I mean, how often do you walk down the street in real life and ask people their stories? Never. They are just other people in your world. Having them there makes the world more interesting, but you don't need to interact with them all. But as games get OMG BIGGER AND BETTER, we have games with encyclopedias of text content. This isn't necessary.
When I was a kid I played a lot of JRPG's which used story to give players a break from the caves and dungeons. Because of memory limitations, NPC's would give a few lines of dialogue to tell the story, then send the players out into the world again. Now the NPC's in those games have huge conversations and cutscenes. Maybe back in the day they wanted to do all that but couldn't, but I remember those simple stories more fondly because they were short and pointed.
Anyway, that was a whole wall of text (the irony isn't lost on me, I assure you), but the TL;DR is just that the genre should determine the narrative delivery system, since it determines why the player is there. And MMO players aren't there to read. They are there to hang out with guildies and kill huge dragons together. Those dragons are there to be big, awesome, and scary enough that they don't need fifty pages of text to justify their presence.
On subsequent characters, I've actually enjoyed reading the quest text and following the story. It's quite good, if you take the time for it.
How many times have you found yourself combing through the text of a WoW quest to find additional clues as to the quest parameters? WoW quests have both a long and short version of what you are supposed to do, and I always find myself reviewing the long version to help me locate the area that I'm supposed to be in.
Another thing that happened alot was players skipping information or missing chat bubble dialogue and getting frustrated because they didn't know where to go or what boat to get on to go to the right zone. To this effect, WoW added sign posts to all the docks, because no one bothered to read the text that the dock npc's had, which told you what boat went where. I would enjoy a more dynamic quest giving but I would not do away with the quest log or journal that documents the full information.
I also found that instead of reading the quest text, people would rather ask in general chat for what they are supposed to do, or look it up online. The information is right in your quest log!
Classic RPG's are generally designed with narrative/story-telling being the key ingredients when it comes to game design. Giving the player choices via dialog options throughout the game as a means of opening up non-critical path subplots enhances the overall player experience. Remember the days of "Choose Your Own Adventure" based books? That is what the Classic RPG game model is all about.
Now if you were to have classified Mass Effect as representing more of the Action RPG element, then I probably would have agreed with you. I mean, if you are comparing Mass Effect to the text based adventure games of old, I would say that companies like Bioware, Bethesda, and Blizzard have pushed the envelope and come a long way in terms of implementing text/dialog into game design. You also have to factor in the game design aspects of real-time vs. turn-based strategy as well when you are talking about the effects of text and dialog options in RPG's.
Sure bigger isn't always better, but comparing ARPG's to CRPG's is like saying apples and oranges are the same. They most definately are not.
Maybe I should have just stopped talking to them. Maybe I'm just a completionist dinosaur who will grind out all the achievements and talk to every last soul even though I'm not having fun. I dunno. But I do know that I wholeheartedly agree with Yatzee's (the Zero Punctuation guy) review of Mass Effect - there were too many words, and the words were skippable, but I felt like the game resented me for skipping them.
I play games mostly for exploration (that's the part I really like), though I like a little story thrown in to give my exploration some context. Maybe that means I shouldn't play games like Mass Effect, which is sad. I'll either drag my feet to try to absorb it all, or miss it all, which takes away the context, which makes me stop playing.
What if games had a "story setting"? I mean, games have scaling difficulty settings, and have had them for a long time. So why can't a game like Mass Effect have a "Encyclopedic Story" setting and a "Gimme the Cliff Notes" setting that players can pick at the beginning of the game? That way I still get the basic elements to give my combat and exploration some context, but I don't have to read (or listen to) what NPC#326626 ate for dinner last night, and why he thinks the present political tension between the Tredonauts and the Dinglejingles is going to be a problem for the trade treaty.
If games are moving toward customizing the experience for the player, why hasn't a game included a "story setting" yet? I can't be the first person who's thought of that.
This was a problem when I first played Baldur’s Gate II. I wanted to complete *all* the side-quests in each area, to get more and more XP and all the better weapons. It took too long, I stop playing before finishing it.
I realized many years later that I could get a much better game experience by trying to face this game as my character would (if it could decide for itself).
So I played Baldur’s Gate II again, and decided that this time wouldn’t try to do everything and talk to every npc, and it worked, in fact I played the hole game thinking as my character would think decline good XP quests and even lost a good character in a trap when Minsc got petrified and destroyed, but I didn’t load the "last saved game" and just keep going.
I tried to play this as I was interpreting a live action RPG and it was a totally different experience. I could understand the game story and didn’t get bored when talking to npc’s.
So maybe much of a good narrative experience results from the way the player decides he wants to experience the game.
I used to do that for RPGs, but around the time Mass Effect was released I decided to stop playing RPGs like that. There really isn't a need to customize the story like you suggest because that option is already there. You don't have to talk to every person like you think you do. Now that I play games like that I find them more enjoyable, and when I do actually find someone that says something useful it is more of a reward. I just talk to people if I feel like it or if they look interesting. I play the games more like if I were the "hero" walking through a town. I wouldn't stop and talk to every person, but certain interesting situations or people I might ask something.
Except most gamers are not like this and it's a good thing too, since most stuff they cram into RPG games for sidequests and whatnot is not that entertaining or interesting. I am primarily an action gamer. While I liked Baldurs gate and planescape torment, the baldurs gate engine sucked. Once action RPG's came out I couldn't go back to the lethargically slow pace of baldur's gate, I want to be in control of my avatar. BG and planescape torment had larger parties to manage so automating battle made more sense but I would have loved to be able to take control of one of my party members in BG or torment and have the characters game mechanics play out more like ARPG's like diablo. I feel like I have nothing to do when playing those kinds of games where everything is automated out the ying yang.
I think the real issue is the time between quest/npc/story bit and cool battles and things you want to experience, I call it "the reward curve".
If the pacing of a game is too slow you will get bored, part of the problems with some RPG's is that there are TOO many things to do but most of them are boring and not entertaining experiences. That and there is the memory effect, the more games of type X or Y you play, the less easily interested you are in the game. Your standards go up and you need a higher and higher dose of depth or excellence to get any fun out of the game.
In fact I think many games today mediocre compared to games of the past, I would love to see someone remake FF1 but enhance it, I played the FF1 remake for the PS1 and they didn't go anywhere near far enough, they should have taken FF1 and pulled an FF7 where they take the basic framework and remove parts that didn't work while keeping the spirit of our favorite parts of the game. But I don't think square has a clue of what made FF1 such a great game that spawned an entire franchise, it's one of the simplest games in terms of story and gameplay but it has the core elements of RPG excellence.
FF origins, final fantasy 1 to me, is a game that strips away RPG's of all the flashy narrative crap and gets to the guts of RPG's - an excuse to fight monsters, badguys and slay dragons!
Truth is we really don't care too much about deep stories if the gameplay sucks, Mass effect would have been a disaster if the didn't have action portion of the game making it more like a Pseudo FPS with RPG elements.