28th May 2004, 11:35 AM
DJ/ I wasn't talking about Fable or anything like it.
You dont need a giant game or 5 years of production to do it. All you have to do is reimagine the way games are played and experienced.
In a movie you are presented with a stranger. The movie will now spend about two hours to make you love or hate that person through experiences he or she goes through and through extremely well crafted writing that few can do and even fewer can comprehend, since all they see is the story and not the sctructure.
Act 1. The Hook; Initiating Event, the Call to Action, the Commitment to act. 25%
Act 2. Subplot (optional) Moment of Truth, '4 act theory' (optional). 50%
Act 3. Realization, confrontation, resolve and "unexpected/inevitable" ending. 25%
The protagonist goes through the changes.
The antongonist causes those changes.
The end of the movie is when the main plot and any subplots is resolved. This is usually 120 pages (page a minute) but sometimes need to go on longer as in Titanic or Abyss; The perfect examples of when a movie needs to be longer than 2 hours.
In video games today, they try to emulate that very same structure and they have no idea what they're doing. The result is a video game with a story on top of it like a beautiful dinner at an expensive restaurant covered in ketchup. In an RPG there is actually very little gameplay until you get in a fight (or find a mini game)! But the story is sometimes really good though they almost always borrow from anime structure which I usually dont like (they dont follow story telling dynamics and usually rely on suspense of belief = a 'bad' story telling agent (it's why the matrix sequels sucked)) so the result is ketchup with a beautifuly prepared dinner on top of it. Chrono Trigger, for example, actually got the player to worry about the characters, you have to save Lucca's mom from the machine, you need to help Marle resolve the fight with her father, Frog MUST find peace with Cyrus, Robo must come to terms that he was built on the deaths of human beings and he was made to exterminate humans. Add some more sub plots and an obvious pro-ant relationship between the characters, and lots of mini games, arcade style play and an awesome fighting engine make the game a perfectly well rounded experience that is exactly what people have always wanted - A cinematic experience in a video game. But it only works in RPG's! You cant make a first person shooter with a story that detailed because you're constantly shooting something. You cant do it with a fighting game because you do nothing but kick the krap out of other people, in only works in RPG's because it's ssssslllllooooowww paced and allows for many aspects of story telling.
In old video games, there was no progress, the better you got at the game, the harder it would get until eventually you reach the limits of the game, and beyond that, you can reach stratospheric points to amaze yourself and your friends. That's it. And that's the basis of all good video game structure. Now you want to put a story in that? Okay how about:
“Greetings Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada!"
A kid in a trailer park, named Alex who wants a better life, lives with his mother and little brother Louis, Alex had dreams of going places. His girlfriend Maggie was content with going to City College, but Alex wanted more than that.
One night, at the end of a particularly bad day, Alex was playing the only video game around: The Last Starfighter. By chance or by skill, he racked up the highest score ever on the game, with the entire trailer park population as witness! (Tells you how exciting things were around there when something like that was a really big deal!). The crowd celebrated his success, and then left him alone to contemplate his accomplishment.
Then a visitor arrived. Centauri, a stranger in a fancy car (The Star Car), asked Alex who beat the game, and Alex told Centauri it was himself. Then everything in Alex's world changed.
Centauri introduced Alex to Beta, an android duplicate who took on Alex's features after simply touching him. Unknown to Alex, Beta's role was also to take over Alex's life. Alex is coached into Centauri's car and then locked in as Centauri takes off down the road at a stunning 300 MPH before arcing into the sky and heading off into space. Alex's adventure has begun.
A few minutes later, Centauri takes off his "face mask" and reveals himself to be an alien. Sometime later, they land on Rylos, home to the Star League Command. Unbeknownst to Alex, he's been recruited to join the Star League! Alex is led to the inprocessing area and given a translator before he is shuffled into a briefing area. There Alex meets Grig, a friendly alien who comments that Earth isn't mature enough to be approached by the Star League.
Alex has already had enough. After a suprise "visit" from Xur, Centuari is forced to take Alex home. Once back on Earth, the Star Car breaks down, leaving Alex to walk home. Discouraged by the turn of events, Centauri hands Alex a signaler to call him back should he change his mind.
Yet, Alex can't return to his old life. He discovers Beta in his bed, and, after a rather humorous discussion, uses the signaler to call Centauri to pick up Beta. Within the hour, an alien assassin called a Zandozan attacks, injuring Centuari. Realizing the danger, Alex decides to return with Centauri to Rylos, leaving Beta to mimic him on Earth. Beta is unqualified for the duty and runs into some pretty funny situations, especially at the lake with Maggie.
On Rylos, the Star League HQ has been all but destroyed in an attack. Alex realizes the even more serious danger out in space and again decides to return home. Unable to further use the broken Starcar, Grig decides to return Alex in a proto-type fighter called a Gunstar.
On the return trip, the pair encounter an enemy fighter and Grig, much Alex's dismay, engages it. During the battle, Alex realizes that he does have what it takes to be a Starfighter and realizes he's the last one, the others having been killed in the earlier attack.
The pair engage the Ko-Dan armada, blasting apart enemy fighters with their advanced superfighter, and eventually destroying the Ko-Dan mothership in a spectacular battle. Alex returns to Earth a hero and gets Maggie.
They return to Rylos where Alex begins to help rebuild the Star League.
Great story! Now, as a video game. We'll break it up in two different engines.
First you have your Trailer Park and here, the game is akin to Shenmue. you can talk to everyone in the trailer park and the idea is to keep your love meter high with your girlfriend (watch out for Jocks with trucks!) while playing The Last Starfighter arcade game and trying to get th highest score, you can only play once a night (day to night time is 15 minutes). We'll re-use the Trailer Park engine for the Space Station as well so you can meet and greet with aliens in the same functionality. In this engine, you have some fighting moves and you can drive your 1978 Pinto.
The next engine will be the Gunship cockpit, a space shooter. Just an arcade shooter with wave after wave of enemies, the better you play, the harder it gets.
Now... we'll just fill everything else in with cut scenes.
Hey! This sounds like... huge krap. Another push the botton and watch a movie game. Oh rapture. Be still my beating heart. And you know what? They never made a game about The Last Starfighter because by the time video games caught up to the level of what the Last Starfighter could be as a game (Starfox) no body wanted to play a wave after wave shooter save for a quick 10 minute fix.
Okay that story doesn't work at all in a video game unless it's just the Starfighter scenes which means everything else is told through cut scenes. That would work, but the story would be an aftertaste and a game like this should be just that.
If you think of the best game you ever played, what usually comes to mind first? If you're like me, you thought of Mario 64. Which has absolutely no story. You progress through the game based soley on the desire to see what's next and see what other experiences you can achieve. After the 3rd level I totally forgot that I had to fight Bowser who was causing only indirect changes to Mario. He locked all the doors, he fights you 3 times and that's it. In Mario 64 you didn't have to think of a plot or wonder who that person is, you never had to guess who killed who (which I think is a stupid plot in a video game where you can die and come back whenever you want) or stop an evil empire. You simply did what came naturally in a video game - You looked for fun things to do.
By accomplishing goals, you would be rewarded with stars. All the stars did was give you the ability to access new levels and areas. No special powerups or weapons, no special power that would help you defeat the end boss. All it did was reward you with the idea of getting a new level. That is so genius but it's totally over looked.
Now take Mario 64 give each level a story with multiple braches. Each level has act's 1 through 3 with all the fixin's. And how it's resolved is up to you, there's no "best way" just different ways to resolve the issues. And those ways of resolving them are up to you and in that process Mario's character if formed; Certain arguments and confrontations, questions and answers are recorded on to the memory card and then pulled up whenever you converse with a new character so that your character stays intact through the entire game. Dont like the character you ended up with? Start a new game! But then the theory is destroyed that if you create a character with no character people will project themselves in to that character through the actions they choose to do, to keep that method we have to find a balance between confrontation, story and choices.
Now like a said a movie has the technical aspects of storytelling down pat, but video games dont. You cant make a two hour window in to someone's life an interactive video game. In a game, you ARE that person. In a movie you wonder what it would be like to be that person. And that's the trap that devs are falling in to "Isn't our character awesome!?!? Isn't the story we put that character through awesome???" No he or she isn't awesome because it's not me! That character would be awesome in a movie or book but not a game; Samus is me, Link is me, i'm also Mario and Chrono... and none of these characters have dialoge! They never talk except for grunts and gasps! I wouldn't call "Here we gooooo!" a huge insight in to Mario's character, he's saying that because I pressed start and I want to play the game (perfect manipulation of in game dialoge to player interaction).
Nintendo, RE, SH, and Sega are trying to find that place in virtual story telling where it has a story with characters but it's still a good video game. And they're close. Morrowind almost does it but still comes across as a stat building game and a simulator; "you can do anything and we give no direction" You dont need total freedom to do ANYTHING you just need to have a few choices. I know I sound like an egomaniac, like I know more than these companies but I do know alot about stories and storytelling and i want good stories in video games, but keeping it a video game... that's the hard part. It's never been done and the people who are trying to do it can only work off of theories. Some devs think you need a grand game, a game with no ending, you can alter any aspect of it, but there's no art there and there's certainly no story telling. Unless you like reading pages upon pages of backstory.
And... yeah.
You dont need a giant game or 5 years of production to do it. All you have to do is reimagine the way games are played and experienced.
In a movie you are presented with a stranger. The movie will now spend about two hours to make you love or hate that person through experiences he or she goes through and through extremely well crafted writing that few can do and even fewer can comprehend, since all they see is the story and not the sctructure.
Act 1. The Hook; Initiating Event, the Call to Action, the Commitment to act. 25%
Act 2. Subplot (optional) Moment of Truth, '4 act theory' (optional). 50%
Act 3. Realization, confrontation, resolve and "unexpected/inevitable" ending. 25%
The protagonist goes through the changes.
The antongonist causes those changes.
The end of the movie is when the main plot and any subplots is resolved. This is usually 120 pages (page a minute) but sometimes need to go on longer as in Titanic or Abyss; The perfect examples of when a movie needs to be longer than 2 hours.
In video games today, they try to emulate that very same structure and they have no idea what they're doing. The result is a video game with a story on top of it like a beautiful dinner at an expensive restaurant covered in ketchup. In an RPG there is actually very little gameplay until you get in a fight (or find a mini game)! But the story is sometimes really good though they almost always borrow from anime structure which I usually dont like (they dont follow story telling dynamics and usually rely on suspense of belief = a 'bad' story telling agent (it's why the matrix sequels sucked)) so the result is ketchup with a beautifuly prepared dinner on top of it. Chrono Trigger, for example, actually got the player to worry about the characters, you have to save Lucca's mom from the machine, you need to help Marle resolve the fight with her father, Frog MUST find peace with Cyrus, Robo must come to terms that he was built on the deaths of human beings and he was made to exterminate humans. Add some more sub plots and an obvious pro-ant relationship between the characters, and lots of mini games, arcade style play and an awesome fighting engine make the game a perfectly well rounded experience that is exactly what people have always wanted - A cinematic experience in a video game. But it only works in RPG's! You cant make a first person shooter with a story that detailed because you're constantly shooting something. You cant do it with a fighting game because you do nothing but kick the krap out of other people, in only works in RPG's because it's ssssslllllooooowww paced and allows for many aspects of story telling.
In old video games, there was no progress, the better you got at the game, the harder it would get until eventually you reach the limits of the game, and beyond that, you can reach stratospheric points to amaze yourself and your friends. That's it. And that's the basis of all good video game structure. Now you want to put a story in that? Okay how about:
“Greetings Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada!"
A kid in a trailer park, named Alex who wants a better life, lives with his mother and little brother Louis, Alex had dreams of going places. His girlfriend Maggie was content with going to City College, but Alex wanted more than that.
One night, at the end of a particularly bad day, Alex was playing the only video game around: The Last Starfighter. By chance or by skill, he racked up the highest score ever on the game, with the entire trailer park population as witness! (Tells you how exciting things were around there when something like that was a really big deal!). The crowd celebrated his success, and then left him alone to contemplate his accomplishment.
Then a visitor arrived. Centauri, a stranger in a fancy car (The Star Car), asked Alex who beat the game, and Alex told Centauri it was himself. Then everything in Alex's world changed.
Centauri introduced Alex to Beta, an android duplicate who took on Alex's features after simply touching him. Unknown to Alex, Beta's role was also to take over Alex's life. Alex is coached into Centauri's car and then locked in as Centauri takes off down the road at a stunning 300 MPH before arcing into the sky and heading off into space. Alex's adventure has begun.
A few minutes later, Centauri takes off his "face mask" and reveals himself to be an alien. Sometime later, they land on Rylos, home to the Star League Command. Unbeknownst to Alex, he's been recruited to join the Star League! Alex is led to the inprocessing area and given a translator before he is shuffled into a briefing area. There Alex meets Grig, a friendly alien who comments that Earth isn't mature enough to be approached by the Star League.
Alex has already had enough. After a suprise "visit" from Xur, Centuari is forced to take Alex home. Once back on Earth, the Star Car breaks down, leaving Alex to walk home. Discouraged by the turn of events, Centauri hands Alex a signaler to call him back should he change his mind.
Yet, Alex can't return to his old life. He discovers Beta in his bed, and, after a rather humorous discussion, uses the signaler to call Centauri to pick up Beta. Within the hour, an alien assassin called a Zandozan attacks, injuring Centuari. Realizing the danger, Alex decides to return with Centauri to Rylos, leaving Beta to mimic him on Earth. Beta is unqualified for the duty and runs into some pretty funny situations, especially at the lake with Maggie.
On Rylos, the Star League HQ has been all but destroyed in an attack. Alex realizes the even more serious danger out in space and again decides to return home. Unable to further use the broken Starcar, Grig decides to return Alex in a proto-type fighter called a Gunstar.
On the return trip, the pair encounter an enemy fighter and Grig, much Alex's dismay, engages it. During the battle, Alex realizes that he does have what it takes to be a Starfighter and realizes he's the last one, the others having been killed in the earlier attack.
The pair engage the Ko-Dan armada, blasting apart enemy fighters with their advanced superfighter, and eventually destroying the Ko-Dan mothership in a spectacular battle. Alex returns to Earth a hero and gets Maggie.
They return to Rylos where Alex begins to help rebuild the Star League.
Great story! Now, as a video game. We'll break it up in two different engines.
First you have your Trailer Park and here, the game is akin to Shenmue. you can talk to everyone in the trailer park and the idea is to keep your love meter high with your girlfriend (watch out for Jocks with trucks!) while playing The Last Starfighter arcade game and trying to get th highest score, you can only play once a night (day to night time is 15 minutes). We'll re-use the Trailer Park engine for the Space Station as well so you can meet and greet with aliens in the same functionality. In this engine, you have some fighting moves and you can drive your 1978 Pinto.
The next engine will be the Gunship cockpit, a space shooter. Just an arcade shooter with wave after wave of enemies, the better you play, the harder it gets.
Now... we'll just fill everything else in with cut scenes.
Hey! This sounds like... huge krap. Another push the botton and watch a movie game. Oh rapture. Be still my beating heart. And you know what? They never made a game about The Last Starfighter because by the time video games caught up to the level of what the Last Starfighter could be as a game (Starfox) no body wanted to play a wave after wave shooter save for a quick 10 minute fix.
Okay that story doesn't work at all in a video game unless it's just the Starfighter scenes which means everything else is told through cut scenes. That would work, but the story would be an aftertaste and a game like this should be just that.
If you think of the best game you ever played, what usually comes to mind first? If you're like me, you thought of Mario 64. Which has absolutely no story. You progress through the game based soley on the desire to see what's next and see what other experiences you can achieve. After the 3rd level I totally forgot that I had to fight Bowser who was causing only indirect changes to Mario. He locked all the doors, he fights you 3 times and that's it. In Mario 64 you didn't have to think of a plot or wonder who that person is, you never had to guess who killed who (which I think is a stupid plot in a video game where you can die and come back whenever you want) or stop an evil empire. You simply did what came naturally in a video game - You looked for fun things to do.
By accomplishing goals, you would be rewarded with stars. All the stars did was give you the ability to access new levels and areas. No special powerups or weapons, no special power that would help you defeat the end boss. All it did was reward you with the idea of getting a new level. That is so genius but it's totally over looked.
Now take Mario 64 give each level a story with multiple braches. Each level has act's 1 through 3 with all the fixin's. And how it's resolved is up to you, there's no "best way" just different ways to resolve the issues. And those ways of resolving them are up to you and in that process Mario's character if formed; Certain arguments and confrontations, questions and answers are recorded on to the memory card and then pulled up whenever you converse with a new character so that your character stays intact through the entire game. Dont like the character you ended up with? Start a new game! But then the theory is destroyed that if you create a character with no character people will project themselves in to that character through the actions they choose to do, to keep that method we have to find a balance between confrontation, story and choices.
Now like a said a movie has the technical aspects of storytelling down pat, but video games dont. You cant make a two hour window in to someone's life an interactive video game. In a game, you ARE that person. In a movie you wonder what it would be like to be that person. And that's the trap that devs are falling in to "Isn't our character awesome!?!? Isn't the story we put that character through awesome???" No he or she isn't awesome because it's not me! That character would be awesome in a movie or book but not a game; Samus is me, Link is me, i'm also Mario and Chrono... and none of these characters have dialoge! They never talk except for grunts and gasps! I wouldn't call "Here we gooooo!" a huge insight in to Mario's character, he's saying that because I pressed start and I want to play the game (perfect manipulation of in game dialoge to player interaction).
Nintendo, RE, SH, and Sega are trying to find that place in virtual story telling where it has a story with characters but it's still a good video game. And they're close. Morrowind almost does it but still comes across as a stat building game and a simulator; "you can do anything and we give no direction" You dont need total freedom to do ANYTHING you just need to have a few choices. I know I sound like an egomaniac, like I know more than these companies but I do know alot about stories and storytelling and i want good stories in video games, but keeping it a video game... that's the hard part. It's never been done and the people who are trying to do it can only work off of theories. Some devs think you need a grand game, a game with no ending, you can alter any aspect of it, but there's no art there and there's certainly no story telling. Unless you like reading pages upon pages of backstory.
And... yeah.