Games and Game Stories: Part 1

Or, why can't more video game studios make a good episodic game series?

In this day and age of rising development costs and digital distribution, episodic gaming seems like a natural choice for small, independent developers as well as larger, more established development studios.

I'm of the opinion that it isn't about the technology, or the team size, it's about the story. Game writing is - as much as it pains me to say this - largely laughably bad.

I can count on two hands the number of really good game stories, with well-rounded characters, etc. that have been released and have also been fun games to play. Game Writing, as others have lamented, seems to be in this push and pull between good narrative development in the dramatic tradition and interactivity.

In other words, you can't tell a good story in an environment where the player has a say in the outcome of the story. So, most game developers bail because:

1. It costs too much money to work on something that few players will appreciate
2. Gameplay always trumps narrative
3. The average gamer doesn't really care about the story

In response, I say:

1. The gamers that appreciate great stories are the ones that tell their friends that they should purchase the game.
2. Got me there; this is the biggest challenge for writing in games, but it IS possible to integrate the two (see "Bioshock", "Mass Effect","Fallout 3" and "Max Payne 1 & 2") without failing either the gameplay test or the story test. The studios that set out to write good games and make fun games to play requires a integration of purpose and cooperation that seems to be lacking in most mainstream game studios. Even big studios, like Epic, have failed tremendously to great compelling stories that fully embrace their outstanding gameplay. Sure, Gears of War 1 & 2 are fun games to play, but I tuned out the story because it was laughably bad - in premise, dialog and characters.
   
3. There is some truth in that, but do they not care because the story is bad, or they just don't care about a story at all.

Point 3 is perhaps the most intriguing, and it seems to me that the the logic behind the argument is circular. People don't care about story in games, because the story is bad, so we will put in a bad story.

One of the reasons why games in story are so bad is that the person often writing the story, characters, dialog, is also tasked with working on so much else. From designing systems (from the most basic UI to the most advanced AI), to tuning gameplay, to mocking up art, interface, sounds, and whatever else needs doing, Game Designers are also typically tasked to write the story, concieve the characters, write the dialog, and generally concieve the universe in general.

Designing systems is no small feat, and considering much of it consists of going back and forth between all of the departments to ensure that everyone has their say in what the system should do. All of this, I assure you constant reader, takes a great deal of time.

It's no wonder that Games get lambasted for their stories, the people entrusted to write them are overwhelmed with designing everything else for the game! Of course the stories come off as bad!

Well, I'm of the opinion that most games simply aren't planned to be that enduring and aren't built to be as such. Part of it is the ephemeral nature of the industry: if the next contract doesn't come, the next game isn't made and the company closes. The other part is that most Game Designers are not writers. We are responsible for so much...stuff...that every other department looks at the story, which should be the corner stone of the single player campaign, as an afterthought - a context through which their technical and artistic wizardry.

For Part II: how game designers should get more serious about narrative.

Classes and Accessibility

I've been talking quite a bit to folks around the office as well as fellow developers about MMOs. Since I've been a lifelong roleplaying gamer, going all the way back to the Red Box of Dungeons and Dragons as well as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1st Edition), there is a certain vernacular that a generation of gamers - call them Generation N - are used to using and have become accepted terms across a variety of genres.

One of the core aspects of Dungeons and Dragons is the notion of "classes". That is, Classes serve a set of predefined terms, abilities, and modifiers that skew that character to a specific role in the group. When someone reads "Fighter", or "Thief", they have an expectation. Not only does this provide a specific level of tactical invisibility - people know what they can and cannot do, based on which class they provide - but it also provides an unappreciated but definitely required accessibility for both experienced and the new player.

Accessibility is a huge part of MMO design (and Game Design in general) if you want your game to carry more than 100,000 subscribers, and the one thing that the high population MMO games all share is their commitment and use of classes. Classes give experienced players a preconcieved notion as to the capabilities of their character from inception, and let inexperienced players easily identify with their character abilities and be able to play effectively from the start.

It's easy to look at WoW and say that is the paradigm for classes and accessibility - and you'd be right. The numbers of subscribers, and simply put, the ease at which it guides a player from 1-60 is something that all developers should stop and admire. Whether you agree with their art style or lore choices, you can't ignore that Blizzard always gives you something to do, somewhere to go, and something else to see along a highly polished path.

Unfortunately, when classes have been implemented in MMO's, few games embrace one of the key aspects of a class-based system: multiple clases. Multiple Classes allows more hardcore players to expand and try additional classes while sticking to what they know and enjoy and creates a player-driven, optional layer of depth that games like WoW are missing. Too bad more games haven't tried something similar as Final Fantasy XI.

I should devote some time to talking about why I don't like Skill-based systems that eschew classes entirely, but I think my strongest arguement is in the continuing popularity of games that use classes as their means of character progression. WoW, Everquest/EQ2, Lineage 1/2, LOTRO, all have done exceptionally well with a class-based systems, far outpacing their skill-based bretheren.

Which begs the question: do skill-based games fail to draw in casual gamers due to the inherent obtuse nature of skill-based progression?