Oh definitely. In order to have a quality experience with an NPC it can't be a one-time one use identity. And better writing does add depth.
Unfortunately computers are really bad at writing. Humans do an infinitely better job when it comes to creativity, computers can only iterate what they already know, an can only approximate real creation. But with a lot of content to be made, I wish that procedural generation could assist more, take some of the time/work off of the developers.
Alright, so how about we open a new can of worms?
What do you think of players being able to create story elements? Other than just interacting and influencing using their character, do you think if you give the tools of editing, that there would be those responsible enough to make quality content? Obviously you'd have to review the stories + lore and things, but it would sure be easier than the development team creating every scrap themselves.
Of course they could still rely on players to contribute story/lore/suggestions outside of the game. But what do you think about in-game contribution? How could we get players to add something to the story that others could experience?
In a few games, I've heard of journals/notes that players can write and leave as physical objects in the world. That's pretty interesting! It could even expand to books/stories that could be crafted/printed and sold/bought. Not direct story, but it would add a lot of backstory/lore.
Edit: Just realized that question seemed to imply lore/passive story. I'd like to ask it about the actual plot/physical content as well.
Story vs Gameplay
Quote:Original post by CadetUmfer
Narrative Mechanics
Good vedio.
This is actually what I was getting at with my post. We can use mechanics to deliver a story to the player.
In Missile Command, the plot is fixed, the world is fixed and even the end is fixed. However, what the player has is agency over how they get there. They have to make these decisions about whether to save a city or to sacrifice it to save one of their military bases.
Of course, the role is not deep as an RPG would have, but the same principals are there of giveing the player the ability to decide their story.
You don't need a dynamic world or even a dynamic plot, but you need to give the player the ability to own their story and to direct it how they want.
For agency to occur, you need to feel possesion, as this is the first step to becomeing involved with it. Once the player feels ownership, they can be made to feel deeper emotions through either advancement or threat of loss.
Threat of loss is easy, just give the player some risk, but advancment is harder. Most RPGs attempt this by allowing the player character to level up. This sort of works with some players, however it doesn't work for all players.
I think Minecraft does a good job of advancement. Because the players build their "house" and this takes work to do, this gives them both a sense of ownership and advancement at the same time (and this is one way to do it well).
It is through their efforts that they advance their house, but it is because they made it and designed it that they own it. By tieing them up together so well, Minecraft has given the player an agency.
Listen to people when they describe their Minecraft experiences. they tend to do so as a story rather than a set of achievements. Think of WoW, where players tend to talk about what level they are, what gear they have and so on. But in Minecraft, the players talk about how they had near misses, how they had to block up a leak they didn't know they had in their defenses.
Instead of talking aobut "things" or what goals they have achieved, the players of Minecraft talk about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. they talk in narative rather than facts. This is becasue they have agency over the story.
Author
Thanks for that video link, that really blew me away.
I browsed through their other videos and they make some excellent points about game design.
And think about just how much less effort it took for one person to create minecraft than a massive crack team of veterans to create World of Warcraft.
Sunandshadow brought up a post about plant raising/farming a little while ago. Players of MMOs often jump at the chance to own their own land, or house, or farm. They'll even settle for instanced houses, just so that they can call something their own.
I can see how there can be other ways of 'owning' the story other than a dynamic world. That link kind of wrapped up my initial question about mechanics telling a story.
I browsed through their other videos and they make some excellent points about game design.
And think about just how much less effort it took for one person to create minecraft than a massive crack team of veterans to create World of Warcraft.
Sunandshadow brought up a post about plant raising/farming a little while ago. Players of MMOs often jump at the chance to own their own land, or house, or farm. They'll even settle for instanced houses, just so that they can call something their own.
I can see how there can be other ways of 'owning' the story other than a dynamic world. That link kind of wrapped up my initial question about mechanics telling a story.
The hypothesis that the purpose of a videogame is to tell a story needs some more discussion.
First of all, it isn't universal: in many games, the fun to be had in playing with them has priority, and although most or all games might be considered to have a story on a formal level it might well be a story that interests neither player nor author and that doesn't deserve much telling effort.
For example, Tetris has a "story" about stacking incoming blocks under progressively more unfavourable conditions. Do we care about the who, where and why of all this block stacking? No, there's a block already falling that we have to take care of. Do we consider the brutal progression of hostile board presences and increasing speed a metaphor about life? Why not, but there are no artistic details to distract us in that direction, and in any case such reflex-impairing meditations are better left for when the game is over.
The relationship between story and gameplay might even be reversed in the videogames that tell a story, usually in an introduction before actually playing, in order to support the enjoyment of the action: to introduce to the player elements of the game's world that he'll have to interact with, to make the action meaningful (e.g. the mutual alien invasions of Starcraft), to put the player in the right mood, to justify a tutorial or a simplified game at the beginning, and so on.
For example, there is a Starcraft scripted single-player map that reimplements Tetris; it is an amazing technical feat, but instead of being either a sober tech demo or abstract Tetris as usual it manages to be silly and entertaining with a lengthy introduction that justifies the action with packing hastily delivered (thrown) bundles of frozen monsters in full rows to let a teleporting device ship them away before our cargo hold fills up.
So, if a game has "scripted parts", "hard coded cut-scenes" and "dialogue" and only the "parts of a game unlike a film" are interactive, we are talking about popular but very narrow forms that I tend to dislike: the somewhat interactive film (select one of several long animations, maybe with the privilege of looking around "freely") or the cutscene-ridden and gimped action/FPS game (do what we expect to progress to the next checkpoint or cutscene, or do something else and die trying).
I think games (proper games, not limited interactive elements intruding into scripted stories) can help telling stories, or rather giving messages, through roleplaying: instead of merely seeing soldiers in a war film, you can become a soldier in a war game, dying and killing, with game rules ensuring that you really learn to be a soldier and you continuously behave like a soldier in order to win.
Effective roleplaying doesn't require world-changing decisions: even in games that are a linear sequence of discrete battles that can be only won or retried, like Starcraft or DooM, good design provides ample means both to express one's style and taste through strategy and tactics and to learn to think, respectively, like a ruthless general that creates units only to send them to die in a battle of attrition or like a lonely space marine surrounded by monsters.
First of all, it isn't universal: in many games, the fun to be had in playing with them has priority, and although most or all games might be considered to have a story on a formal level it might well be a story that interests neither player nor author and that doesn't deserve much telling effort.
For example, Tetris has a "story" about stacking incoming blocks under progressively more unfavourable conditions. Do we care about the who, where and why of all this block stacking? No, there's a block already falling that we have to take care of. Do we consider the brutal progression of hostile board presences and increasing speed a metaphor about life? Why not, but there are no artistic details to distract us in that direction, and in any case such reflex-impairing meditations are better left for when the game is over.
The relationship between story and gameplay might even be reversed in the videogames that tell a story, usually in an introduction before actually playing, in order to support the enjoyment of the action: to introduce to the player elements of the game's world that he'll have to interact with, to make the action meaningful (e.g. the mutual alien invasions of Starcraft), to put the player in the right mood, to justify a tutorial or a simplified game at the beginning, and so on.
For example, there is a Starcraft scripted single-player map that reimplements Tetris; it is an amazing technical feat, but instead of being either a sober tech demo or abstract Tetris as usual it manages to be silly and entertaining with a lengthy introduction that justifies the action with packing hastily delivered (thrown) bundles of frozen monsters in full rows to let a teleporting device ship them away before our cargo hold fills up.
So, if a game has "scripted parts", "hard coded cut-scenes" and "dialogue" and only the "parts of a game unlike a film" are interactive, we are talking about popular but very narrow forms that I tend to dislike: the somewhat interactive film (select one of several long animations, maybe with the privilege of looking around "freely") or the cutscene-ridden and gimped action/FPS game (do what we expect to progress to the next checkpoint or cutscene, or do something else and die trying).
I think games (proper games, not limited interactive elements intruding into scripted stories) can help telling stories, or rather giving messages, through roleplaying: instead of merely seeing soldiers in a war film, you can become a soldier in a war game, dying and killing, with game rules ensuring that you really learn to be a soldier and you continuously behave like a soldier in order to win.
Effective roleplaying doesn't require world-changing decisions: even in games that are a linear sequence of discrete battles that can be only won or retried, like Starcraft or DooM, good design provides ample means both to express one's style and taste through strategy and tactics and to learn to think, respectively, like a ruthless general that creates units only to send them to die in a battle of attrition or like a lonely space marine surrounded by monsters.
The hypothesis that the purpose of a videogame is to tell a story needs some more discussion.
First of all, it isn't universal: in many games, the fun to be had in playing with them has priority, and although most or all games might be considered to have a story on a formal level it might well be a story that interests neither player nor author and that doesn't deserve much telling effort.
For example, Tetris has a "story" about stacking incoming blocks under progressively more unfavourable conditions. Do we care about the who, where and why of all this block stacking? No, there's a block already falling that we have to take care of. Do we consider the brutal progression of hostile board presences and increasing speed a metaphor about life? Why not, but there are no artistic details to distract us in that direction, and in any case such reflex-impairing meditations are better left for when the game is over.
In Tetris, the game designer does not force a story on the player, but allows the player to create their own. Now what I mean by stroy, is not a litteraray stroy like War and Peace, or Lord of the Rings, but the experience of their journey in the game (and yes there is a journey in tetris - it is the increasing speed and riseing level of blocks). In tetris, the story is an abstract one, but there is still a story that the player experiences as they play.
You can hear this if you ever talk to someone about their tetris experiences. they will not just tell you about any sinlge block placement, but will tell you the situation leading up to it, the block placemnt and the consiquences of that placements.
But look at the traditional definitions of stories and you will see the 3 Act story. These are the Introduction, the Event and the Closure.
Guess what, when people describe their tetris (or game) experience, this is what they use. They give an introduction (the situation leading up to the event, then They will talk about the Event itself and then they will describe the consiquences of this event. It is the 3 Act story.
My opinion is that the average MMO has way too many NPCs and hardly any of them have any kind of personal interaction with the player. I'd like to reverse that - slash the number of NPCs by as much as 90% resulting in 10x as much dialogue per NPC, and give the player a relationship meter or checklist with each one. Help the player build a history with these individuals rather than making them throwaway questgivers whose names the player probably doesn't bother to learn.
The biggest problem I can see with this is that I can't imagine it mixing well at all with the economics that drive so many MMOs. It's far easier to scale some integers and call it progression / interactivity. If you have 90% less NPCs and 10x as much dialog you now have lots of reading (or god forbid VO) but still no material improvement on ACTIVITY-- unless the activity is reading. You may have a far more well drawn world but over time won't you run into the same problem that plagues serial TV shows and comic books, namely that of cycling through the same plots over and over again? It would be a major fail to just have a more elaborate excuse to "kill 10 bats and bring back 10 bat wings."
I'd personally like to see an army of content creators being folks who are creating dialog and story snippets but I'd much prefer this driven by players who have a valid reason to do so (not just folks wanting to LARP). I'd love to see this sort of thing driven by stats and rules so other players could view the history and see the exploits of previous players.
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