Storytelling in Computer Games

Cosmicbandito writes: "The latest issue of XYZZY News features transcripts and audio downloads of a 2 hour panel discussion titled "Storytelling in Computer Games Past, Present and Future". Scott Adams, the celebrated designer of classics like "Adventureland" and "Pirate's Island", described his experiences in the early days of the home game market, offered his opinions on the current crop of games, and made predictions about games of the future. Scott is credited with writing and marketing the first commercial computer game. Of special interest to Slashdotters, he is also an avid Everquest player. And no, he doesn't draw "Dilbert"." Think "pre-Infocom".

Game creation tools..

The social element of gaming, vs. the story-and-puzzle elements. Scott predicts that, within 5 years, game-creation utilities will simplify designing.

Doesn't that just mean more cookie-cutter games with slightly different graphics? The games that really make a difference I think will always be built from the ground up and based (hopefully) on a somewhat unique concept..

i used to love those appleII games

Remember those great apple II games on those big 5 1/2....those were the days!

why??

special interest to Slashdotters, he is also an avid Everquest player.

why is this of special interest?
personally it tells me his mind has turned to mush as far as story telling in games go. But hey, thats me.

Built from the ground up?

Games aren't built from the ground up for christ's sake.
Serious companies have their own in-house libraries which they extend and adapt to make their next game.
Think SCUMM and Lucas Arts for instance. There were *oodles* of adventure games made with it, and they all ruled!
Think of the Final Fantasy games. I love all of them, even though they are all very similar. The first five or six in the series must have shared a LOT of code, being almost photocopies of each other with updated graphics and slightly different gameplay. They were all basically a tile graphics engine plus some sort of scripting thing for the gameplay events etc.
Then they went 3D with FF7 and I can bet whatever you want that FF 8 and 9 reused one hell of a lot of code from 7.
People don't do anything from scratch these days.It would take *years* to develop the sort of libs companies have accumulated over time.
If someone tried to make a game from scratch, it would most certainly end up being bug-ridden, delayed, and much less than the cutting-edge stuff large companies put out with the latest in 3D and EAX-enhanced sound.
Start-ups just buy an old engine and try to make something interesting with it. And often fail.

Games != Books. Games != Movies.

Hi. I'm Brian. I make video games at Midway.

I get frustrated when people talk about authoring tools replacing game development, or holding up storytelling as the holy grail of game design.

If you're looking for the high level "flow of the game," you're better off looking at Jean Piaget's writings than you are any of the authors explaining storytelling-as-game. Take hits like Robotron, Quake or Tetris and try to tell me which of the 36 dramatic situations fit those games. Ask the hard core gamers whether they even know the storyline which was painted on after-the-fact.

Piaget talks about sensorimotor (learning about the self/environment through motor reflex), preoperational (anticipatory cognition), concrete (action based on perceived and anticipated outcomes) and formal operation (master of a system).

Good games drive a player from a stage where they basically learn to move (sensorimotor operations) to one of grossly influencing the environment (concrete or formal operations). The high level flow which I believe should be the real focus of study, is one of making the game teach or reward the player in the first stage, then rise to meet the player thereafter. A good game extends itself to match the player's capabilities as they unfold, guiding and challenging the player in the game's own terms. The degree to which the player has to focus to stay one step ahead of the unfolding system is the degree to which good "flow" is present.

That hasn't got a thing to do with the story.

If the player cannot establish a synergistic state with the game early on, the game has failed. A good game rewards the player to draw them in, making them think they've overcome the system, from the state where they're fumbling with the controls to the stage where the control has become transparent through practice - transparent enough that the player feels a more direct interface with the adopted environment and is struggling to participate in the environment itself.

Adventure games are story/game hybrids. Take that as a starting point - there is an element of a game attached to some of these, but only those particular games are more story than game - they are in the minority. When academics grasp the story portion of a select few games and declare that in furthering the story element, they know how games need to work, you see in action the very thing that makes us keep the academics at arm's length: We're not interested in turning our games into books, and we have little patience for ivory tower authors who loudly proclaim that we're failing when we don't do just that.

My opinions are not always those of my employer - they keep us on a long leash and give us amazing amounts of freedom to express ourselves at Midway, etc., etc., etc., and you should feel sorry for yourself if you don't work here.

The videogames aesthetic

A good game rewards the player to draw them in, making them think they've overcome the system, from the state where they're fumbling with the controls to the stage where the control has become transparent through practice

So true. But there's so much more that goes to make a 'good game'. In Trigger Happy: The Secret Life of Videogames Steven Poole (composer, Time Literary supplement author, and videogames enthusiast) sets out to answer the question 'What makes a videogame good?'. His attempt at understanding the videogame aesthetic does a great job of building a taxonomy of videogames and describing what makes a game enjoyable.

I couldn't hope to capture his findings in this brief post, but suffice to see that neither story nor game mechanics are of themselves enough to make a good game. Other elements discussed by Poole includes the importance of balancing the right amount of reality vs fantasy, the importance of frame-rate, appropriate graphics and sound, the use of rewards, the development of an immersive experience, and a whole lot more.

If anyone thinks that building a great game is easy and can be done by following a simple formula, I think you'll change you mind after reading this book.

Maze

You're in a maze of twisty little Slashdot comments, all alike.

I miss the storytelling of those games, and the hours upon hours spent trying to figure out what the exact word the CENSORED parser was looking for. I guess that frustration has just been replaced with lag time in the new games.

Ultima was best..

The Ultima Saga (3 to 8) I feel are probably some of the best thought out games I've ever played. Ultima IV, in particular, given a single goal... and Ultima V where you had to choose between your your friend (Iola) (i think i remember that far back) And a village. Death for one or the other.

Course, Unreal Tournament is pretty popular right now with me... and I LOVE Civilization and Alpha Centuri ... but they get old (and boring) quickly.

Sounds like cookie cutter games are the wave of the future, and I don't know if I like it. Original thoughts limited by tools.... time to design new tools :)

Y2K was just something that happened to others?

Anybody else notice the lack of Y2K compliance? I've seen the same thing happen at sites with an old implementation of wwwboard...look at the bottom of the issue and you'll see:

This page was last updated on Monday, September 3, 101.

heh heh heh

Purple Monkey Dishwasher!

Because I hate to see legends of old corrupted by those too lazy to do their fact checking (shame on you Adams), here's what happened with Rainz, the guy who killed Lord British, as told to me by the thief and filtered through 3 years of memory.

The crowd had assembled, or part of it at least. British had just started addressing the crowd when someone in the crowd was peeking around in backpacks of those around him using his thieving skills. He found a firewall scroll, handed it off to Rainz, who threw it at Lord British for the hell of it, he didn't think it would hurt him.

I'm not certain, but I think at this point, British may have mentioned something to the effect that this firewall couldn't hurt him, thinking that his invulnerability flag was on (not a ring, a GM power). Unbeknownst to him, someone had forgotten to turn it on and his life bar was dropping quickly and he fell over dead even as he gloated about his invulnerability. End of story. Rainz was banned, but the thief was never fingered.

Thus was a gaming legend born.

Interestingly, it was probably as a result of this incident and the screenshots circulated of it, that people were able to easily create UO comics depicting a dead Lord British.

Best storytelling on Earth.

Any Final Fantasy game on the SNES console, and even FF7 have got some of the best stories in games that I have ever seen.

storylines in games, bleh

When I think about what makes a a particular game fun to play, I think very little of the storyline. For most of the FPS games that people play nowadays, the storyline is just something we notice taking up space on the screen while waiting to connect to a multiplayer server. We'll take halflife for example. The reason the original halflife game didn't flourish was because of the story line getting in the way of the gameplay. It seemed every 5 minutes you would have to stop and wait for a character to talk to you for information on how do complete the mission. But if you look at all of the sucessful halflife mods out there (counterstrike [counter-strike.net], firearms [firearmsmod.com], paintball [paintball-mod.net]), It shows that the creation of the halflife engine was a great success, and that is why halflife was game of the year for the past few years. So depending on the target audience, games with really strong storylines dont fly well with the FPS game movement.

Lost art of storytelling

Hi!

I don't know, maybe I'm just nostalgic. But computer games used to be great when I started out with my Amstrad CPC: Graphics were amazing, Sound not so much (the CPC had cheesy sound) and the Games were fascinating.I used to play such simple things like Boulderdash, Gryzor (a shoot em up) and all time classics like Bard's Tale and Elite.

What made those games great? Considering nowadays games those were ridiculously simple: Few colors, 320x200 pixels and horrible sound. The stories? In Elite you fly around with a ship you could equip with a lot of gimmicks, you bought and sold goods to get money or you became a pirate and attacks innocent traders, you were able to smuggle forbidden goods. Sometimes you even got to do special missions (those really happened rarely). I'm not too deep into games anymore, but I don't know of a single game nowadays that comes anywhere near!

Bard's Tale was so much fun too: You ran around with a party of adventurers and killed anything 'moving' (of course nothing did really move, this computer had 64K of RAM:-). Storyline? Well, you went to diffrent places to kill and eventually fought the ultimate evil wizard... Nothing compared to todays multiple CD epics. Yet, I did kill that evil wizard multiple times... today I hardly ever finish a game anymore.
Why did that happen? Did I change? Or did the games get boring? Is it some kind of 'been there, done that'? I don't know.

Playing todays games I am fascinated by the graphics and sounds for a while, I play for a few hours and then I'm getting bored. Somehow I keep getting the impression that the money goes to the artists, not to the script writers. Producing a computer game is getting more and more like making a movie: You need a script, but you get most of the audience with the special effects. Some gems (like Myst) emerge sometimes, but those are rare and far between...

What really catches my imagination for a while is the multiplayer feature of todays games: Real humans are so much more challenging then those dump computer controlled opponents. But even there I eventually feel bored: Most games just don't let me do what I want to do. They restrict me too much to be fun for long.
Am I the only one who feels like that?

Regards,
Tobias

He's not an idiot for liking EQ

If you'll read the article, he hasn't hit level 20 yet. That's where the primrose path becomes choked with thorns. Storytelling and roleplaying takes a backseat to camping and competition. There's still alot to be said for EQ and what it provides, but I don't think it's got what Adams is looking for. The world is sterile by design, players cannot affect it at all. He'll figure that out soon enough.

I would have preferred if he had focussed on Ultima Online instead. Because users are able to change so much, and thus create their own cities and quests within the game.

It's all about user created content, and UO was fantastic in that aspect, whatever you may think of the rest of it. In my mind, none of the other MMORPG's have come close to UO in quality because of this (although Asheron's Call's new housing system may bridge that gap).

A Zork movie on the horizon?

Zork [mrbillsadventureland.com] was a wonderful game. I would love to see a movie based on the storyline. I found this site [corona.bc.ca] which says that a movie has been conceived, but is in development Hell.

Of course, I loved Dungeons and Dragons (even the cartoon), but couldn't stand the movie that just came out.

In games, speech and social aren't there yet

Before rpg/adventure games reach "the next level" in storytelling, we'll need to make some really major advances in in-game language and social interaction.

Dialog trees and the simpler (a la Diablo) mechanisms of social interaction that we have in today's games are fine for today's stories, but if you want anything more, they get really limited really quickly.

Since the days of text adventures and the old-style Sierra games, we abandoned user-input speech for simpler forms because computers were too limited, and actually dialoging with player-driven characters was unweildy and unrealistic. But in the year 2001 our computers, which can render 3 physical dimensions and intensely realistic video and audio ought to be able to handle more convincing linguistic social interaction.

In today's games, stories are vehicles for killing things or for solving puzzles. I don't think that you're going to see these things disappear any time soon (most of us like killing things and solving puzzles) -- but there's a lot of room for story to become gameplay, and not garnish-for-gameplay, that has not been tapped yet.

For example: really multiple storylines / outcomes. (You could do these with dialog trees but the amount of work/writing would be too much). Situations with moral consequences, situations where interpersonal problems change the game and how the story unfolds, that the player actuates. We have hints of this in Planescape, The Longest Journey, etc., but only hints, really.

Kudos to the Piaget-poster. I'm a big fan of Piaget, and it's a good point that storytelling in video games is about cognitive mechanisms. In terms of solutions to these problems though, looking to Chomsky & other linguists, and to book-writers might be most productive.

Ben Schneider
Scenario Designer
Stainless Steel Studios, Inc.

What upsets me the most...

...is that Scott Adams finds text adventures boring [uwec.edu]...

Why does this upset me so much?

I will tell you why:

Go to the bottom of that page, and notice that he gave away copies of Return to Pirate's Island 2 [msadams.com]...

Guess what - that game, as it exists today - would not look like it does now had it not been for my direct input.

You see, during the development of RTPI2, I was a beta tester for Scott, for this game. I, among other people, signed up on a mailing list, got copies of the game engine and data modules (an Windows EXE and various DAT files) to play around with - to note what was right, what was wrong, what should be improved.

I noticed right off things to be improved - the descriptions of rooms and objects were very primitive - I asked him to change it, so that it would be more story-like. I gave him the suggestion of adding sound effects to help liven the game up a bit. It was strange, once I started making the various requests, there was a small hiatus in postings to the group from Scott, then he announced that he was going to completely revamp the engine based on my suggestions! I was floored!

I had gotten onto the list, and became a beta tester, because I see him as an influence on my early computer life - I got into computers and programming because of the early games, especially text adventures. As a kid, I looked up to him in those early days as a notion of someone who had "made it" - there were others (you don't hear much from them - like Bill Budge, etc) - but to actually get this kind of chance, well - couldn't pass it up.

But never did I expect to cause him to totally alter the game play of that new adventure. But I did, somehow.

Anyhow, he finished up the game, thanked all of the volunteers, mailed each of us an autographed piece of the game script code, and gave each of us a copy of the finished game. The list went on for a while, then was shut down (not too many months ago, actually).

But one thing he gave me (though I can't give it to anyone - at least not yet), is something that very few beta testers get - actual game code. You see, I knew what he was using for RTPI2 - Visual Basic. I offered to convert the system back to standard console mode, by first doing whatever cleanup to the VB code, then downconverting that to C, and making it portable (with a Linux port in mind for the future). Well, I got the code (and no, I will NOT give it to anyone, so don't even THINK about emailing me), and (sorry to say) - it was crap. Basically it was a VB wrapper around the old hacked up IBM BASICA source from the original game of RTPI (or was it GWBASIC?) - anyhow, it was ugly - damn ugly. I started a conversion, trying to straighten out the GOTOs and whatnot into more standard VB (and let's not turn this into a VB flame fest, alright?), but I stopped after a few days - it was horrible.

But, I still have the code, and I might still convert it, someday...

So - I can't understand why Scott says he hates text adventures - I think he might be bitter about the way things have gone with RTPI2 - as far as sales, etc - he just isn't making money there. Maybe he is also bitter about the fact that it is nearly impossible for a person to "go it alone" as far as making a game is concerned, and marketing it, and selling it.

No, I don't think RTPI2 is the be all and end all of text adventures. Infocom has already proven what really can be done. I just can't understand why it is possible for fantasy fiction authors to make a bundle, but as soon as you try to make a text adventure game, no one seems will to buy the thing for "reading pleasure" - I tend to wonder if an ebook-type system, where you could actually read and adventure, would be more of the style (think of it as "choose-your-own-adventure" or "twist-a-plot", but on steroids). Would anybody buy such an interactive book (I am also thinking of Diamond Age here, as well)?

Interactive Fiction and Story Telling

Adams' statement that he doesn't like text adventures, "he finds
them boring", is I think, a result of him not playing modern text
adventures - or Interactive Fiction as the afficianados refer to
them :-)

As the host of the event says, "recent text adventures are of the
quality of the short story". I couldn't agree more. Photopia by
Adam Cadre is I think, the pinnacle, so far, of story telling in
the computer game medium. It's not puzzle based, as you might
expect, but a surprising story delicately told.

Interested readers can find it at the interactive fiction
depository, (I can't connect at the moment for some reason so I
can't offer the complete URI)

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive

On a related note: my Scott Adams interpreter is based on a
program written by Alan Cox (Scott-Free). Does anyone know if
this is THE Alan Cox?

Constructing a story in games...

One of the most interesting things about creating a story-based game -- and for the sake of this discussion we'll say adventure games are the truest type of "game that tells a story" -- is the parallel development of puzzles and story.

For a long time people have analyzed the telling of stories, and in particular the work of Joseph Campbell has been very prominent. Christopher Vogler, with his book The Writer's Journey : Mythic Structure for Writers [amazon.com], took it a step further and effectively wrote a formula for creating a story.

Well, I wrote my own adventure game engine [twilightsoftware.com] and released it to the public, and then I started making my own shoestring-budget adventure games.

I found Vogler's book invaluable for two reasons:

Firstly, it helps to create a story that has all the elements that the audience expects in a well-told story.

Secondly, the same formula helps in designing puzzles that progress forward.

While I can talk about how I did this in my own games, it's cool to take a look at some of the classics and see how they used the same ideas. Ron Gilbert's phenomenal Monkey Island 2 is one such example. Act one has a story that introduces the characters and a small setting, with three or four items that are required to build the voodoo doll. A string of three or four independent puzzles are chained together with one conclusion. Act Two sees the world expanded to a number of islands, with a similar set of separate strings of puzzles. Act Three is a kind of grand showdown. But the hero's journey is not yet complete, and Guybrush faces what I always called Act Four, on the final island, in which the hero is redeemed, in a fashion. Reading Vogler's book helped clarify many of the choices made.

Hmm, where is this post going? I guess there are a few points:

- Building puzzles that integrate with story can be a beautiful and elegant process.

- Having a plan as to how the story will be laid out makes it easier to design how puzzles are laid out to integrate with the journey.

Making shoestring-budget adventure games with your friends as FMV actors is cool fun :)

- Brendan

Remember the Fighting Fantasy books?

To me these books are the equivalent of the story telling that happens in games at the moment. Read straight through(a kid in the back of a car can't really throw dice) they are rather simplistic and not exactly fun, the only joy came out of the actual participation. Not through the story. Take Ultima Underworld, the story was put to the back, the joy was in the travelling through the world, the joy was making the story for yourself, using your imagination. This is what makes a great game. A set of toys, a set of devices which enables the player to interact with the given world which though has an ultimate goal, the path to that goal is not dictated.

The amount of times I've played a game to a point and then had to fervently click a button to get through the cut-scenes simply so that I can get back to the proper business of playing the game, gets me quite depressed. I don't play a game so that I can listen to the developers story, I play a game so that I can devise my own. Sure give me pointers to the characters but don't tell me a story, let me devise my own.

what a bunch of crap

The assumption that all games today are not as entertaining as yesteryear's is really starting to get on my nerves.

Guess what, you can't compare games like Asteroids and Super Mario Bros to a game like Quake or Everquest. Why? Simple. Games back in the day were appealing for one of two reasons. One, because we're all a bunch of geeks and crap like computers and game consoles interests us, or two, because it was an entertaining means of telling a story.

Nowadays, the great games are the ones that are innovative or play well. I play these games because it's fun trying to kill a baddy that's ducking behind something, or because I can explore, horde and try things, not because it has neat graphics or a great story (athough those are bonuses). If I was in search of a great story, I wouldn't buy a game, I'd go buy a book.

Storylines are for the weak...

As the subject says, storylines are for the weak - they try and make up for shoddy "gameplay." Notice I put "gameplay" in quotes, because I can't really define it and because that one word is a congolmeration of things: graphics, sound, interface, and the like - but not plot. Take some of the most classic and loved games: Tetris, Quake, Windows Solitaire. They don't have plots or really fancy graphics (well, Quake did, but that was not the attractant). what made them good was their missions.

In Tetris you have to get a bunch of odd shapes into lines. No reason, you just do, and have a huge amount of fun in the process (and get really addicted). Quake? Sure, there's a story, but no one cares about it. The game is fundamenatlly Bowing Shit Up in new and creative ways. Solitaire? You try and win - that's it.

Being a Windows user, I've recently fallen in love with Minesweeper. It has no graphics, sound, FMV, or plot - you simply try and win. I can play Starcarft for maybe an hour and get sick of it; I can play Minesweeper until my eyes hurt from the small squares.

As I see it, that's the key to making a good game. You don't need a plot or a reason for doing somthing, you just make the goal winning. In all three of the games I mentioned above (and racing games like GT3) the M.O. is essentially the same. You turn the game on, and then you figure out how to win (keeping whatever parameteres the game designer has set for you in mind).

When you put a plot in a game you cover over the primary reason to play: to win. These are the true classic games - ones where the only thing that starts you into the game is the desire to conquor, and to do so you must perform a creative series of acrobatics are proscribed by the game designer. As I said earlier, storylines are for the weak...

Pre Infocom?

I don't think that 'pre-Infocom' applies as a description of Scott Adams works. As a matter of fact, the first Zork was implemented as a direct result of the enthusiasm that some bright guys at MIT got when they saw 'Colossal Caves', the Fortran program that is really the first example of 'adventure'.

The first Infocom games date from the early 70's, and were later ported to popular platforms such as the Apple II. I've played some games by Scott Adams in the early 80's, and while they were fun, nothing could compare to Zork.

Scott Adams on my TRS-80

I loved those games when I played them in 1979 on my TRS-80 Model I (with a cassette player). My uncle ran a computer store and gave me copies of Pyramid Of Doom, Voodoo Castle, and Ghost Town.

We played them for hours, and there were no websites to visit for hints, cheats, or walkthrus. There was nothing more satisfying then dropping a treasure into the treasure area and looking at your score jump.

I still have all of those adventures in a box somewhere.

Bungie makes a good model for balancing gameplay

I've always thought that Bungie was successful in finding a good mix between a compelling story and an innovative gaming engine. Look at engines like those in Marathon, Myth, Oni, and the upcoming Halo. They always made some significant contribution to their respective genres, whether it be in graphics, physics, or gameplay. Additionally, the story in most of these is reason enough to play them; for Myth and Marathon I was especially compelled to keep playing just so I could find out what would happen next. To get a sense of the importance of a good universe and plot background, check out the Marathon's Story [bungie.org] page. For a game released in 1995/1994, it's pretty amazing that the site is still being updated almost every day (except, of course, when the maintainer is on vacation ^.^).

Would the REAL Scott Adams Please Stand Up

When Dilbert first came out, I thought to myself, "Gee, the Adventureland/Voodoo Castle/Pirate's Cove/The Count guy has got a comic strip now. Pretty neat!"

Boy was I bummed when it turned out to be a different Scott Adams...