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Why Isn't the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories?


A panel of gaming leaders looks at why "story" seems to be a four-letter word in gaming.


By Dave 'Fargo' Kosak | March 15, 2005

 
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A lot of people might argue that "story" and "games" don't belong together. "Stories" imply a linear medium, and games are all about the player making all the choices. But, can't good storytelling make good games better? And why don't we see more of it? The debate isn't a new one -- the topic comes up every year at GDC -- and it's the subject of numerous books (see our interview with author David Freeman elsewhere in our GDC coverage). But this year's Game Developers Conference featured a great panel by some of the leading thinkers in the gaming space, worthy of its own writeup.

The panel included Tim Schafer of Double Fine Studios (hard at work on the unique game Psychonauts, perhaps better remembered for classics like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle), as well as Warren Spector (the industry veteran responsible for Deus Ex and others.) Rounding out the executive side of the discussion was Neil Young, VP and General Manager of Electronic Arts LA. Neil has been the driving force behind the Lord of the Rings games, the Medal of Honor franchise, and more. A good mix of talent was present.


From left to right: Moderator Andrew Stern, Tim Schafer, Neil Young, and Warren Spector.

Skillfully orchestrating the panel was Andrew Stern of InteractiveStory.net, who took a very vague topic and framed it in such a way that really cut to the heart of the matter. (Afterwards, the issues people talked about spilled out into the hallway and presumably continued to be discussed throughout the rest of the show.) Specifically, Stern told the panel not to try to define the word 'story' or what it means for games, but rather to "Identify the specific qualities or pleasure that we get out of stories that we don't currently have in games."

For example, a lot of games have a solitary hero who saves the world, but few titles look at the relationships between individuals. What about personal conflict? Feelings, relationships? Should games be doing this, and if so, why aren't we? The panel kicked off!

Question 1: What are the Most Important Qualities of Stories?

Warren Spector said that there were a couple of major elements that stories bring about. The first is genuine human interaction. He admits that the game industry has made great strides with making more believable characters, but that they're still 'cardboard cutouts' compared to what's available in other media. He also thinks that empathy is a key element of storytelling. "I want to feel what they're feeling," he says. He suggests that maybe we don't feel more for videogame characters because it's such a "narcissistic medium," where the players see every NPC as an obstacle.

Spector also pointed out that games need inherent victory conditions. He wondered aloud if that need for a victory condition hurts the storytelling aspect of games. He also speculated that inner conflict has no clear inners or losers or victory conditions, so it isn't 'fun' as a game mechanic, and that's possibly why we're not seeing deeper stories or characters in games.
Neil Young also agreed that empathy and emotion is the most important part of stroytelling. "The best stories begin when you leave the movie theater," he asserted. That's when you begin to share the story with others and dwell on it, learning more as you think about it. He asks, how can the industry make games where people will put down the controller and walk away with something?

Tim Shafer agreed that empathizing with characters is definitely the key. Great stories have characters that seem real, characters you can't stop thinking about. Characters you want to help. "It's hard to do," he confesses. But a memorable story will stick with you for years, and that empathy is the major reason why.

He took this opportunity to talk about one of his biggest pet-peeves. There's more to life than Science Fiction or Fantasy! ("There's carjacking," Spector interjected.) Schafer says that games need to draw from the whole entirety of human experience. From history, from the world around us, and more.


Neil Young (left) and Spector differ on how much progress is being made in the story arena.

Spector jumped back into the conversation here and said that one of the biggest things that good stories do is that they give the participant "a feeling that the story is about more than just the story." Spector wants gameplay to have some meaning. If you read the Lord of the Rings books, they're not about the big battles. They're about people, trust, fear and hope. He says that the industry needs to strive for more. "A subtext once in a while!" he grumbles.

Question 2: Why Haven't We Achieved This Yet?

Shafer was the first to tackle this question. He asserts that the game industry needs to overcome what's been done before. Not easy! He admits that gamers aren't exactly lining up outside of EB chanting for stories. But, "People would like story more if they saw more good stories," he says.

He also argues that the industry needs to find and nurture more good talent. "We need good writers" he says, people who can tell stories within this medium. Too often game companies skip the writing, save it until the last minute, or bring in "some Hollywood guy" who does it all wrong. But, as a counter-point to Spector's call for subtext, he cautions that game stories need to be meaningful but still need to be fun.

Neil Young is more optimistic about where the game industry is. He agrees that we might not have emotional depth in game characters yet, but that that's a product of where the industry is in its development. Games started as technology experiments, and while we've gotten a grasp on the technology (characters can finally look fairly real), storytelling techniques are still underdeveloped. "We're still before our 'Citizen Kane moment,'" he declares. But the energy is there; it's just a matter of developing the talent. Games have huge teams of artists, but almost nobody focused on story. That will start to change.

Market pressure is also a factor, Young says. He admits that it's hard to tell the board, "Story! It's gonna be big." But once products pave the way, it should start to happen.

Warren Spector is more pessimistic. He says he's actually been in meetings where decision-makers at big publishers have literally said to him, "you are not allowed to say story." He asserts, to follow onto Young's point, that Citizen Kane didn't make any money. But RKO pictures took a chance with it. And, on the whole, the game industry doesn't like to take chances!

It's not that Spector doesn't have any hope. He says that the industry has done some great things over the years. He points out Ultima IV, or Ico. ("I really felt something!") Or Floyd's death scene in PlanetFall. And yet, "there's a great deal of commercial pressure not to do that," he claims. Should we be asking publishers to take that risk or is there a better way?

As an aside, Spector pointed out that companies continually strive for realism. (As a result, he says we've created characters just human enough to freak us out.) C'mon, he says, let's go with stylized graphics. Create worlds with their own unique look. "Stylization is a valuable tool that we [the industry] underutilize."

Finally, Spector (who was on a tear) pointed out that the gaming industry needs to make huge strides in conversation techniques if it's to ever have believable characters. Games can simulate any number of vehicles or explosions, but the simple act of "me flapping my gums," he says, is nearly insurmountable.
 
So, where does the industry go from here? Schafer had a couple of ideas. For one, he says that the talent who can create great stories and characters is out there, they just need to be brought into the industry. He says that things will change over time as we bring in new blood and they get familiar with games and how to integrate story into gameplay.

Schafer also says that game developers can strive to be experimental without letting their publishers know (the crowd of developers watching the talk interrupted Schafer to applaud.) He says that whenever he pitches ideas to publishers, he talks about all the safe, standard features... and about the explosions.

At this point Michael Mateas, a Professor at Georgia Tech and one of the founders of the Game Lab there who had until this point not said anything, talked about the technology that games will need. He asserted that game programmers and designers need to develop a language that will enable them to think about procedural narratives. Follow? In other words, a way of coding games that will deal with unexpected situations and react accordingly. Mateas says that in years to come, awards for "character design" shouldn't just be based on how the character looks, but on how the character behaves in the game. He says that we need to start thinking about story in organic terms, not just as some sort of branching possibility tree.

Spector agrees that we need some new technology, but says that we're a long way away from scaling it up to something that, for example, EA will risk publishing right now. "We have big technical hurdles to leap," he says.

Neil Young doesn't think that it'll all happen at once. He sees game development in the middle of a long, gradual change. For example: Brothers In Arms adds new elements of squad-based combat to the formula that he helped to make popular with Medal of Honor. It's just one experiment that pushes the bar a little higher. It'll be the same with story development. He asserts that "there are ways to explore or advance this topic in games that are very commercial." He thinks it'll happen over time, so long as the game development community has a focus and a committed vision.

Judging by the panel and the crowd reaction, the development community definitely does have a commitment to telling better stories and capturing the elusive emotions of the gaming audience. But, as for how close we are to a "Citizen Kane Moment," -- well, that seemed to be still open for debate.

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