The Eight I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts Of Storytelling in Games

Aubrey at Wolfire Games recently posted a discussion he had with another game developing friend, Jack Monahan, about mastering gameplay, and what that means to the player and about the game. Eventually they drifted off to talking about how story factors into this, and it took the comments thread a little while to realize that they didn’t mean to say “a good story gets in the way of gameplay.” Actually, what they criticized was a situation where “the story is the best part of a game,” which I agree is a bad thing. If a game is trying to be a narrative, it should have the story and gameplay complement each other without either taking precedence; I will now elaborate on that to the amusement of the audience.

If a game developer feels they cannot tell a good story, or if they can’t get a writer…actually, scratch that, if they aren’t a writer already and they can’t get one, then they should probably be making a simulation game. By “simulation” I don’t necessarily mean Microsoft Flight Simulator or SimCity, that’s just the term I use to say “non-narrative” because “documentary” doesn’t always work (i.e. Space Invaders isn’t exactly based on real life, but it doesn’t tell a story). But assuming a developer feels up to telling an epic tale of some grizzled space marines fighting against insectoid/reptilian aliens in a palette of gray and brown, there are a few things I’d really rather they didn’t do. I will now follow in the footsteps of Our Great Noodly Lord The Flying Spaghetti Monster and give you eight of them.

1. I’d really rather you didn’t create a case of “gameplay vs. story”

This is not a debate or a question to ask, it is a design flaw. Of course you’re going to alter the gameplay to suit the story, and of course you’re going to alter the story to suit the gameplay. But for fuck’s sake, don’t make either of them worse in the process.

Case in point: Fallout 3. The game started off great, with all sorts of different quests on the side to play through and have fun with, but by far the most compelling was the main quest about finding your character’s father. It made sense that most of the production values would be devoted there, because they paid Liam Neeson a lot of money to be in it, and it was pretty much the reason your character ran out into the wasteland to make people’s heads explode with low-power rifles in the first place. So naturally, I focused a lot of my effort to the main quest, because there was always a sense of urgency (even though it was possible to say “let me repair my equipment before we go fight the enemy which is right outside” and then not come back for three in-game weeks, but it didn’t feel that way).

Then, all of a sudden, without much warning, it ended in a way that would be heart-wrenching and moving in a linear action game but is completely bone-headed and dumb in an epic, non-linear RPG. This meant you didn’t get to finish all those side quests or play anything else without starting a new game. Nothing in the story or gameplay indicated the point of no return, except for the inability to leave the final area after you’d walked in and probably saved already. So in order to end the game with such an emotional event, Bethesda compromised the gameplay by not allowing it to occur anymore. Now, the best case scenario is if the player reaches this point after there’s nothing else to see in the rest of the game and they know it, so they leave with a sense of closure. But in a game like Fallout 3, the odds of that happening are very, very close to zero.

2. I’d really rather you didn’t separate almost all of the story from the gameplay

If more than five minutes of the story goes by without the player being able to do anything (changing the camera angle or pressing X to not die doesn’t count), then you, as the game designer, should probably reconsider that portion of the story or invent some new gameplay to work with it. It’s perfectly okay to make a game where you control a character’s trigger finger and vocal chords at different sections. And if you don’t want the player to have control over specific story events, make them shorter. Cutting about 75% of the dialogue is a start, since the rules of screenwriting apply to cutscenes too.

The most prominent offender here is Hideo Kojima, especially with Metal Gear Solid 4. Metal Gear Solid 4 isn’t bad at all — it’s a stunning example of filmmaking. The fact that it has interactive portions at all, regardless of how fun they are, is my only (gigantic) gripe with it. Yes, the cutscenes play instead of loading screens, but it takes 20 minutes before you, the player, get to do anything (well, yes, you can change the camera angle or show a flashback or whatever, but I said that doesn’t count already). And later in the game, some of these cutscenes are 90 minutes long. You can pause them, you can save during them, great, but why bother with the interactive portions at all if they add nothing to the cinematics? If I were to watch all the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 as a miniseries on DVD, but never touch the gameplay, I would lose almost nothing from the story.

The Half-Life series, by contrast, tells the entire story through your character. The closest thing to a cutscene that game has is when Gordon (or Adrian or Barney in the expansions) is being restrained by something, but even then you can still turn your head to look, and it’s not for very long. Now, granted, Half-Life has never had a very compelling or comprehensible plot: the first game was about aliens appearing out of nowhere, and this creepy man in a business suit watches you try to escape; Half-Life 2 and its episodes have been about another group of aliens taking over Earth somehow for some reason, but the aliens you killed in the first game are your allies now. What makes Half-Life great is not the plot, but the characters, the moments, all that. It’s comparable to 2001: A Space Odyssey: the movie’s supposedly about a hyperintelligent black monolith thing that made monkeys smart, which is kind of a ridiculous plot, but is that really what we’re thinking about when HAL 9000 starts going insane? No, we’re thinking about the characters who are in danger from this crazy computer, and it’s pretty predictable that one of them will eventually shut HAL off, but knowing that takes nothing out of it. Speaking of which…

3. I’d really rather you didn’t tell a story that makes the game boring to play through a second time

This pretty much applies to every narrative medium, game or not, but it’s especially important when the player has to put in effort to advance the story: if knowing the ending is capable of “spoiling” the whole game, then you’re doing it wrong.

Judging by the lighthearted aura around even the darkest portions, it’s no shocker that Grim Fandango ends with Manny and Meche falling in love and (after)living happily ever after. But even if one or both of them died (again) at the end, the pleasure of playing the game is seeing all those wild and crazy places, hearing all that witty dialogue, figuring out the ridiculous solutions to the puzzles, and listening to the fucking amazing soundtrack. In fact, you can go read the entire plot summary on Wikipedia before playing the game and you’ll still have just as much of a blast with it as you would have without knowing what happens. Don’t do that, though, just play it. Now.

But not every game is quite like that. Some are, as Aubrey and Jack spoke about, “junk like [a] Dan Brown” novel, where knowing the end of the story kills all the suspense and tension that came before it. I can’t think of any specific offenders at the moment because I usually forget about this type of game entirely, but I will say that it was good of KotOR to include such a plot twist at the end of the first act of the game, not at the end of the whole thing. I accidentally found out about it on a forum before playing, so the big moment wasn’t shocking at all, but then there was about 30 more hours of really, REALLY good story (and gameplay) to make up for that.

Then there’s the type of game which, because of the story, has gameplay which is only fun the first time around. Returning to Fallout 3, I felt the opening of the game was brilliant, and it was rather ingenious how they incorporated the tutorial and character creation by letting you play your character growing up. Then I played through a second time and it was all the same, so I just wanted to go shoot super mutants’ arms off with a pistol already. But when I finally got out into the wasteland again, the sense of discovery was lost this time around, except for the discovery that the deep, multiple paths of the storyline weren’t really all that deep or multiple.

4. I’d really rather you didn’t get me interested in the story just before making me fail over and over again

It’s bad enough when a game makes you repeat the same parts you failed over and over for the 24th time when there’s no story at all. When there is a story, or at least what sounds like one, it becomes all the more annoying when you replay the same sequence so much that you forget what’s happening outside of the frustrating gameplay.

What comes to mind is Portal: Prelude, which is, admittedly, a non-commercial mod, but it’s still game design and still includes narrative. Not only was the mod hyped and marketed as containing a riveting story, but it had all the trappings of it when you began playing. The scientists chattering about you would drop little hints that something bigger was going on, probably related to GLaDOS (who everyone wanted to know the origin story of, even if it was unofficial), and that made you want to find out what would happen. Then the first challenge required escaping four turrets in the same place by having pinpoint accuracy within a split-second. And it did not get easier from there.

The developers’ excuse? Well Portal: Prelude is for the Portal master who finds the original game too easy, of course. Except for the fact that “it also had to be feasible for people that were not that used to the gameplay mechanics” of Portal, but no, they have failed at that. But even if that hypocritical statement wasn’t in their design goal, perhaps they should have realized that a person who wants to have their 1337 $k!11z put to the test probably doesn’t give a shit about story, so their efforts are wasted entirely. Unless being in a select group of elite basement dwellers who spend their lives getting good at video games for no reason is prerequisite for being worthy of knowing such an epic tale, in which case that’s kind of ironically pretentious.

5. I’d really rather you didn’t put zero effort into your writing

Like I said about Half-Life and in number 3, dialogue and moments are much more important than plot. I don’t care how epic and riveting your plot summary is, if the characters are all meatheads who say the same clichés over and over, then you can’t write for shit.

Halo is not an example of good writing. It did not sell 23949821358632857392857 copies because of the story. But it probably would have sold 92352935123597235872035870325870 if it had a script by Douglas Adams. Actually, that would probably make it a very different game, but come on…Douglas Adams.

6. I’d really rather you didn’t dupe me into thinking I can affect the story when in fact I can’t

It’s perfectly fine to tell a linear narrative where the audience can’t change how everything plays out. Movies, theatre, and books have been doing it for years, and they’re quite enjoyable. But if you’re going to allow the player to make a choice that seems like it should matter, make it matter.

I’m going to rip on Fallout 3 again. The game has four different possible endings, but which one you get is only determined by two yes or no choices that you make in the final scene. If you make choice A and choice C, you get one ending, choice A and choice D gets you another, etc. So all of those other characters in the whole game, whatever you said or did to them, none of that matters in the long run? Well, I suppose that would be true if the game ended with the universe collapsing (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t).

BioWare, by contrast, always manages to make you care about your actions in their games; their writing is so convincing that I always feel too guilty to play as an evil character. Even in Mass Effect, which had only one ending from a big picture standpoint, allowed lots of the subtleties to be determined by everything you’d done since the beginning of the game. They did drop the ball in Sonic Chronicles, where no matter how much of a prick you are to Amy (the bitch deserves it), she’ll still fucking try to help you, god dammit, but almost all of the problems with that game’s story are related to the fact that BioWare was under contract to not cut the stupid parts of the canon out.

7. I’d really rather you didn’t make the story repeat itself

If for some reason a player has to repeat a section of gameplay, either because they failed it the first time or because you didn’t let them save the game wherever they want since you don’t know how to design games for anything other than an arcade machine, then allow the non-interactive, and perhaps even the non-challenging, portions to be skipped over. The player knows what happened, so don’t make them sit through it again, especially if it’s a die-reload-die-reload-die-reload-x16 situation. Oh, and in dialogue trees, if they’ve exhausted all the dialogue options about a particular topic, let them know somehow if they’re about to repeat something they said already. You could make that particular topic gray or something, that usually works.

I don’t have to give you an example here; just play any game and press lots of buttons during the cutscenes. If none of those buttons skips anything, that’s bad.

8. I’d really rather you didn’t even attempt to tell a story if you can’t adhere to all of the above

If you have a great story and a great gameplay design, but can’t fuse them together in a way that works, stop trying. Change one of them to suit the other or divorce them. Those are your options.

Some stories are excellent but are absolutely inappropriate for the medium of video games. Hamlet, for instance, is impossible to give interactivity; if it is, then you’ve rewritten it or violated what I said in number 2. In addition, some types of gameplay don’t lend themselves well to being mixed with stories. Pong, for example, is probably not the best candidate for creating a narrative around. Yes, Puzzle Quest managed to fuse gem-swapping puzzles with a story somehow, but if you have the slightest doubt that replacing your story with a level number and a score counter would detract from the game, then you’re probably not as clever as Steve Fawkner.