should it be designed?
Rebecca Phillips
BA (Hons) Interior Architecture & Design Final Year
Research Project
'The breadth of stories being told, and the WAY they’re being told, has never been greater.'
(Steve Gaynor interviewed by O'Brien, 2014)
The interactive nature of the game and the obstacles the players must overcome as they work towards the games objectives.
How the gameplay works – the rules, the interface, the scoring etc.
(Ince, S, 2006, p. 168)
Miller (2004) explains that the reason both adults and children take part in games is to simply have fun. ‘You get to play an exciting role and do things you’d never be able to do in reality, and all without any actual risk to yourself… You are in control’ (Miller, C.H., 2004, p.219). It is being able to step away from day to day life, even if for just a few minutes a day, and lose yourself in another world, as explained in Video Games: The Movie, (2014).
Lievana (2010) comments on the fact that gameplay cannot be ignored in game design as that is what makes a game enjoyable, and many players that are classed as ‘casual gamers’, just like to play for the sake of doing something fun, so a strong storyline slowing down the pace of a game will most likely deter them from playing.
Many players however, are looking for more depth in a video game. As Steve Gaynor (writer of Gone Home) states in an interview with O’Brien (2014) for IGN (online), in response to the question of whether developers are starting to reconsider the kinds of stories video games can tell, ‘I think it’s based both on developers recognizing that players are willing to engage with more, different kinds of stories and characters, and on designers relying on more and different kinds of techniques to tell stories than they ever have before. The breadth of stories being told, and the WAY they’re being told, has never been greater.’
'Make no mistake: E.T. for the Atari 2600 was an awful game. It shattered the hopes and dreams of children, and, according to some accusers, it was such a bomb that it annihilated the Atari 2600's fortunes and didn't stop falling until it sucked the entire console industry into a black hole.
The game was made in a mere six weeks after Atari spent $20 to $25 million on the property rights, and skipped quality testing to make it out the door in time for the 1982 Christmas season. The result was a title that still baffles the sane, as the gameplay consists mainly of falling down house-sized gopher holes to find random bits of a telephone. About four million copies of the E.T. video game were shipped, and according to Atari's then-CEO Ray Kassar, about 3.5 million of those copies were returned to Atari.
According to gamer legend, there exists in New Mexico a wasteland seeded with millions of unsold copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600. The landfill was chosen as the resting ground for Atari's dreams specifically because it didn't allow scavengers, and its garbage was crushed on a nightly basis.' (Oxford, N, 2011)
Story has changed user expectations in what a good game is and raised the bar for designers, video games now have more descriptive stories to cater for peoples different desires and consumers are smart, they cannot be fooled into buying terrible games, as explained in Video Games: The Movie (2014). The crash of 83' was referred to in making this point regarding Atari's game E.T, where the game was rushed to meet the Christmas deadline therefore was of terrible quality.
Furthermore, it is explained in the film that there is nostalgia about video games from when people were playing them as children; it is to do with their life at the time, the enjoyment they got out of the game – the personal story.
The Magnavox Odyssey, 1972, was a console where you would have overlays for your TV screen, therefore your imagination created the story.
This is also referred to as the player story. Lee (2013) explains that it is ‘the player’s personal experience. As they play through the game, a lot of things happen in the player’s mind: they experience a variety of emotions, they develop perceptions and interpretations of characters and events, and they form relationships between their own actions and the on-screen results.’
However, Nutt (2013) quotes the views of Michael Mateas (director of UC Santa Cruz's Center for Games and Playable Media), he believes that ‘letting players tell their own stories -- by throwing any damn thing in front of them... that's a really weak, weak notion of letting players tell stories, and it's not really praiseworthy of us as designers.'
O’Brien (2014) states that ‘game developers working in the 'mainstream space' have traditionally struggled to utilise video games as a storytelling medium, struggled to harmonise play and Hollywood-like narratives, and struggled to inject real meaning into their games without rendering the player a frustrated passive participant.’
Interactivity is what makes a video game different to a film or written piece, therefore the narrative is not often seen as the ‘crucial component’. As Lee (2013) continues, ‘a large number of games appear to have serious narrative ambitions, yet they try to tell their stories by jamming together the mismatching puzzle pieces of cinematic control and interactivity… We think what we want are movies with a dash of interactivity, when there is actually an entirely unexplored universe of possibilities out there.'
Video Games: The Movie (2014)
We already have works in literature and cinema that are close to ideal perfection, but we don’t even know what the ideal is in games.’
In terms of a successful story, instead of ‘trying to come up with very specific plot lines, characters, dialogue, and events,’ the designers are choosing to design the context that highlights those elements when they appear. For example, ‘when you find another player, there are visual cues that underscore their presence and introduction. When you communicate with them through singing and body language, all sorts of imagery forms in your mind about the other player’s personality. When you both are getting along fine, a big hazard tests your relationship.’ (Lee, T, 2013) Lee points out that these are all elements of a great story and they have been purposefully designed, they are just not ‘shoved down your throat – they happen naturally.’
Video games have developed with technology and will continue to do so, but it seems that we are at a stage where game designers understand the mechanics, it is now how to develop them to create the experience for the player. The commentators in Video Games: The Movie (2014) continue to explain that games have moved away from the addictive platform games, and instead are increasingly becoming more inventive and the journey is seen as the reward rather than the end.
‘Creating fun, interactive games is about setting challenges for the players and giving them the means to meet those challenges in a satisfying way. Challenges and objectives should be a mixture of short term and long term. In a simple game like Pong, the short term, or ongoing, challenge is to keep the ball in play. The long-term objective is to beat your opponent… Very few games will succeed that are based on a single gameplay mechanic or do not vary the nature of the objectives, so power-ups, better weapons, decreasing time limits and more complex game levels are pretty much par for the course. Interactive variety is very important.’ (Ince, S, 2006, p.16)
Bielski states that ‘a game does not always need the best possible graphics or sound, they just have to work smoothly.’ Nintendo, for example, long championed gameplay over graphics. Bielski continues to say that graphics with sounds, the story and the gameplay all combine to create immersion for the player. He comments on the fact that ‘any game can be immersive, as long as the design and story do their parts.’ For example, strategy games are immersive in the way that you focus completely on completing that specific task such as Minecraft.
For decades there has been the debate over whether games should have stories in them. Nutt (2013) quoting Michael Mateas, states that ‘against this grim background (of debate) we're seeing a Renaissance of work in interactive storytelling.’ He believes that whilst many designers are too busy trying to define interactive stories, ‘indie and mainstream games are happily and visibly exploring many solutions to interactive storytelling.’ (Nutt, 2013)
Gameplay driven design will ‘motivate the player to play the game for the fun itself.’ (Lievano, 2010) but Spicer (2011) quoting David Cage, states that ‘[we] need to forget about game rules–bosses, missions, game over, etc… (they) are old words of an old language’ and that ‘developers need to stop making games based on the old rules established 20 years ago.’ He continues to explain that Cage wants designers to concentrate on ‘creating experiences for the minds and emotions of players’ rather than requiring ‘fast thumbs.’
As people argue over what is most important in a game, Spicer (2011) explains that video games can ‘fall everywhere in the spectrum’, and that is what makes them special. There should be a balance between the two, believes Bielski, and he reiterates that point by saying ‘there is no “VS” when it comes to Gameplay and Story, you need both, to a certain degree.'
In your opinion, which game from the last ten years told the most important story? (Interpret ‘important’ as you wish.) Why?
Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable):
I guess I'll interpret it as “important for me personally.” Radiator by Robert Yang is probably the game that convinced me to begin making games, it was so effective at telling a personal story in a short period of time without any sort of conventional gameplay. This was what convinced me that a shortform narrative-driven gameplay experience truly had the potential to be as compelling as any other kind of game out there.
Steve Gaynor (Gone Home):
Probably Portal, for the way it was told and how it related to the player. Clearly it was an inspiration for us on Gone Home - it’s only a few hours long, you never meet another character, everything is told through environmental storytelling and disembodied voice, all the characters are female - and I think the confidence for them to make a game like that and release it in 2007 was really important and brave. Forging a connection with those characters and that place entirely by being there and standing in opposition to GladOS as a singular presence, all with a humor and subtlety that almost no other game even attempts, was just phenomenal, and I believe set a lot of things in motion as regards the future of video game storytelling.
Rhianna Pratchett (Tomb Raider):
I’d probably say BioShock because it heralded somewhat of a sea change in the way the industry looked at and prioritized storytelling. Here was a game with first-person shooter mechanics, which was also trying to tell a compelling story about the human condition. And it sold. No longer could publishers say that story wasn't important to players. Okay, so sometimes they still do, but we know it’s nonsense and have the figures to back it up. BioShock wasn’t just creating a game, either. It was creating a world. And a world where you could see the stories literally dripping off the walls. It really hammered home the importance of environmental storytelling in a big way. It really built on what Half-Life 2 did ten years ago.
Neil Druckmann (The Last of Us):
This was a hard one; I wanted to pick Ico but realized I was outside of the ten year mark. So for me, it has to be Half-Life 2. I think what Valve did with Alex Vance kind of redefined how you tell a story in a video game, how you create a believable NPC. I remember being blown away by how real she felt, and how I felt like she re-contextualized the world for me. I remember seeing her fight with someone, and then we’d leave that area, and she’d be telling me secrets about that person. It gave me feelings similar to the ones I have with my real world friends; it made me realize so much of the power of storytelling in games comes from NPCs. And at the end of Episode Two when Alex’s dad dies, that’s the only time I’ve ever cried in a video game. So f*ck you Valve for not finishing that series! (laughs)
(O’Brien, L, 2014)