GDC Takeaway: Tiny, Tiny Stories
This weekend, I took part in Michael Abbott’s post-GDC Brainy Gamer podcast, taping a session with Michael and the inimitable, endlessly fascinating Corvus Elrod. I’m honestly still recovering from the conference, and still digesting my notes. Most of my GDC coverage is at the Onion AV Club, where John Teti and I posted daily write-ups. There’s not a lot of spit and polish – we were filing these late every night – but I’m proud of all the stuff we covered and impressed by the interviews and other gets that John pulled in. But looking back over all of this, I see I don’t have a lot of “nutshell” conclusions on what I learned at GDC. So here’s one.
I predict 2009’s GDC will be a watershed moment in how we tell stories in games. And the biggest change will be the death of lengthy, pointless cutscenes.
In our part of the podcast, Corvus, Michael and I talk a great deal about Hideo Kojima and the notoriously long cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4. Those scenes, which run half an hour to an hour and a half, have become a running joke ever since the launch of the game; as Michael notes, during his keynote, Kojima almost seemed to anticipate sighs and grumbles from the audience every time he mentioned them. I’ll admit I still haven’t played this game and can’t attest to whether the cutscenes work. But as the jokes about this tactic grow and more and more pointed, I’m starting to feel like the industry has hit its breaking point.
- Cutscenes are boring, and many players skip them.
- Cutscenes are the antithesis of the interactive experience that games promise.
- Cutscenes cost time and money to produce. They may be an obligatory checklist item for AAA-games like Fracture, Vampire Rain, or Dark Sector, but nobody has ever explained to me why those games had to tell their thin stories in such an elaborate way.
- While games are often compared to movies, it’s an awkward fit: games are unlike movies in so many fundamental ways (and are really, so much more like music) that we should be questioning any attempt to jam “cinematic” or “movie-like” elements in games.
Margaret Robertson also made this point at her excellent talk (my write-up is in here; her PowerPoints are here), where she argued that games should learn to tell stories that are tinier, more cost-effective, and yet more engaging than the ones we’re getting now. For example, Space Invaders puts its entire story right in the title. Those two words tell you everything you need to know. And the story to Space Invaders beats the one in Fracture like a rented mule.
But plotting’s not the only issue. I also heard several great insights about characters. Robertson raised the old F. Scott Fitzgerald chestnut, “character = action”: your characters are defined by what they do (or in games, by what they can do). They’re not defined, or not best defined, by having other characters stand around for an hour talking about them. The history, the troubles, the ambiguous motives and the virtues of a character can all be expressed by what they do in the game. Half-Life 2 – which of course, has no cutscenes – nailed this with the character Alyx: one of the most affecting moments I’ve ever experienced in a game came in HL 2: Episode One, where she briefly broke down and lost control of her emotions, and then pulled herself back together and went back to fighting, and cracking bad jokes. The life she has spent on the run, fighting an overwhelming enemy, and watching her friends and family die, came across in a few seconds, and the fact that we didn’t linger on it – in fact, that we don’t see this side of her again for a while – makes it more powerful.
Even more importantly, however, characters aren’t there because we like them or relate to them. They should fill a need in the game’s mechanics. Clint Hocking and Ben Mattes spoke to this at a small Ubisoft presser/cocktail party Monday night, when they explained the thinking behind the buddy system in Far Cry 2 and Elika in Prince of Persia. In both cases, these non-player characters grew out of a specific gameplay need. In Far Cry 2, they were a resource to manage and to risk as you saw fit. They also had dramatic value – as you’ve seen if you reached the end of the game – but first and foremost, they were useful. The Prince of Persia had a similar reason to create Elika: she’s a save mechanism in the guise of a character, and the attachment players feel to her is a side benefit.
I liked the idea that these crucial story elements, and the emotional attachments they trigger, could stem completely from game mechanics. And it dovetails with my final takeaway on this topic: stories should be tiny. The plot of a game should not exceed the game’s mechanics, and those mechanics probably don’t call for much. Has any recent game told an interactive story better than Portal? There’s not much to it, but it fits the game perfectly. And the elements they don’t have time to explain are left intriguingly ambiguous.
When you think about it, games don’t even need the however-many plots that Shakespeare identified. Videogames really only have three stories:
- The player saves something
- The player survives something
- The player loses something (which is just the denial of success)
That’s it. Many deep, sophisticated emotions can emerge from those three plots. But they should emerge in the experience, in the actions the players take, in the reactions they receive, in gestures and decisions and deaths and tasks and achieving or failing to achieve a goal. They should not emerge from people sitting around talking to each other in a cartoon.
Where does the player fit into those first two stories in the case of, say, Civilization? (Clearly game over in Civ fits the third story.)
Darius K.
April 7, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I came into the video game industry after a long time designing and playing tabletop RPGs (which I still do and wish more developers would). One common problem many tabletop GMs have is creating a colossal tome of backstory for the world, every NPC, every item, etc. Then they try any present this to the players, who almost certainly don’t care, and things turn into painful indulgence of the GM’s poorly-written novel.
This is what Ken Levine (I think it was Ken anyway) meant when he said, “Nobody wants to read your fucking design doc.” The audio logs in SS2 and Bioshock worked so well because they were short and on point. One of the most memorable for me was the old Jewish couple talking about their lost daughter and the “horrible golems.” I imagine that the designers had way more background for those characters than was presented in the game. But the player wasn’t beaten over the head with irrelevant information about their past.
The value of creating background like that isn’t so that it can be included in the game. It’s valuable because it can be internalized so when writing the information those characters do convey in the game, it will be denser, richer and have the desired impact without requiring pages of text or painful cutscenes. Value knows way more about City 17 that has been explicitly presented in Half-Life 2. A good GM knows way more about their world than their players do and *is happy to keep it that way.*
As for how to make that compelling in a game that isn’t single player or is a lot more game-ish is harder. I agree with Jeff Kaplan that nobody wants to read the novels WoW has embedded in it, but I’m not sure how to make that better without it being very dull (“Go get me 10 hog snouts”). One step at a time, I guess.
I haven’t gotten to you and Corvus’ section of the podcast yet, but I’m looking forward to it =)
Nels Anderson
April 7, 2009 at 6:28 pm
[...] GDC Takeaway: Tiny, Tiny Stories « Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen "Many deep, sophisticated emotions can emerge from those three plots. But they should emerge in the experience, in the actions the players take, in the reactions they receive, in gestures and decisions and deaths and tasks and achieving or failing to achieve a goal. They should not emerge from people sitting around talking to each other in a cartoon." Chris Dahlen on post-GDC09 narrative. (tags: games narrative story chrisdhalen writing character plot ) [...]
Infovore » Bookmarks for April 7th through April 8th
April 8, 2009 at 7:00 am
Cinematics are kind of a funny thing, aren’t they? To my mind, they made sense in an earlier age, where you were wowed by the “realism” of those scenes. When I saw the cutscenes in “Defender of the Crown” back on my C64, I was pulled further into the game and more willing to see lumps of pixels as knights and ladies in distress. Now that systems can render (semi-)lifelike characters, cinematics should disappear, but they’re so encoded into the DNA of gamemakers that they hang on like an organ from an earlier evolutionary stage (which there is a word for, but it escapes my mind completely leaving this comment even crappier than it would have been).
/plays stunning but irrelevant movie
Tom Clancy
April 8, 2009 at 8:45 am
I love stories in games, and I think there are ways to put complex, interesting stories in without having overly-long cutscenes. Planescape: Torment used dialogue and a complex backstory to great effect. Curse of Monkey Island had funny, engaging cutscenes that meshed nicely with the cartoony game art and turned the game from a “hunt the objects” story into a ripping comic pirate yarn. Even GTA: Vice City’s cutscenes lent relevance to the player’s massacring of innocent people.
Cutscenes can go horribly wrong, as with anything else in video games. But the solution is not to have simple premises and plots.
gregoryweir
April 8, 2009 at 10:10 am
Chris — Well put. Here’s to the continued shortening and tightening of cutscenes. The more we can find ways to move storytelling into the game itself, the deeper and more seamless the player’s experience will be. Most long cutscenes don’t actually increase a game’s complexity so much as mask its simplicity.
Jordan Mechner
April 8, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Tom: Vestigial?
Jordan Mechner
April 8, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Oh sure, now you show up and make me feel dumb. We’ll call it even for the 6 zillion hours of Karateka I played as a kid.
Tom Clancy
April 8, 2009 at 3:45 pm
“Cutscenes can go horribly wrong, as with anything else in video games. But the solution is not to have simple premises and plots.”
I think that’s a false dichotomy. I’m not sure anyone’s even arguing for it. But I do think you’re dismissing simplicity in narrative a little quickly. Most great stories work because they draw you into them and you can relate to them, not because they spend hundreds of pages describing the scenery in detail and adding in 500 characters*. Give me more time/ reason to play as the character and let me explore my motivations. Making me work as a taxi to get Item A to Location B after finding Key C has been done to death.
* Russian Literature majors, please don’t feel call me out.
Tom Clancy
April 8, 2009 at 3:49 pm
“Even more importantly, however, characters aren’t there because we like them or relate to them… I liked the idea that these crucial story elements, and the emotional attachments they trigger, could stem completely from game mechanics. And it dovetails with my final takeaway on this topic: stories should be tiny.”
This is what I’m disagreeing with. You can tell a story that the player is involved and invested with, and still have plot elements that originate in cutscenes. You can have a big, expansive story with characters that exist as more than gameplay elements, and that’s a good thing. Cutscenes are useful because they allow for events to occur that are not directly supported by gameplay. You can give an insight into what the villain is doing, or take control of the camera for a dramatic scene, or show the emotion on the face of a first-person protagonist.
The solution to bad cutscenes is not to make tiny stories that don’t call for cutscenes. The solution is to make good cutscenes. Some stories don’t need them at all; awesome. But cutscenes make a lot of games better.
I talk about my opinions on this topic in more detail in an episode of my podcast: http://ludusnovus.net/2006/07/29/ludus-novus-episode-001-press-enter-to-continue/
gregoryweir
April 8, 2009 at 4:15 pm
@Tom To be fair to Greg, I think caution he urged is valid. I’ve seen some people misreading what Margaret Robinson et al. said. Chris hasn’t, but others have.
As much as a love games that purely ludic with little/no real story (latest being And Yet It Moves, which is fantastic), there’s not where all games should go.
We need to get better at making stories more information rich and less excessive. The naive approach to this is paring stories to near non-existence, and we ought to avoid this. What we need to do is cut out the hundreds of pages of meaningless detail (in games, these are cutscenes) to focus on what’s engaging.
Nels Anderson
April 8, 2009 at 4:31 pm
At the risk of moderating the thread, I want to clarify that I don’t think cutscenes can’t work or don’t have a place in games. They make sense as chapter endings, as places to catch a breath, etc in games that are paced that way.
Tom Clancy
April 8, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I’m with Tom – I would never tell a game designer not to use a particular technique, or say that cutscenes can never work.
Darius – When a game can’t end, could we substitute “maintain” for save? That would work in SimCity.
Nels – That’s a great point, because I’m actually intrigued by world-building and am a big fan of lore, rich character backgrounds, and so on. (For example, I’m a huge fan of Planescape, which made me want to learn as much as I possibly could about the bizarre and wholly new world in which I found myself. Plus, unlike WOW, the whole thing was framed like a mystery – so you start off curious and bewildered.) As you say, the trick is either to internalize the backstory as you’re write the script, or make it available without choking the players on it.
Gregory – You’re right, I emphasized “tiny stories” without emphasizing how a simple framework can yield really intriguing and rich stories. And of course your game, The Majesty of Colors, is a great example. The premise is rich, but I came to understand it largely by my actions in the game.
Jordan – “Most long cutscenes don’t actually increase a game’s complexity so much as mask its simplicity.” – Well put – I completely agree.
savetherobot
April 8, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Chris, I just hope you’re right about a turning/breaking point for the majority of (interested, engaged) designers out there.
I didn’t expect Portal’s lesson to rub off on people right away, but I hope it helped get the point across to people that AAA does not mean “pretends to be (poorly-written) Hollywood” when it comes to storytelling.
Nels, I’ve encountered that tabletop RPG problem a lot, and the GM I play with has finally, I hope, learned the lesson of not getting overly attached to elements that we players may not care about. (The most he does now is throw out a posthumous teaser about what we might have seen had we chosen differently. I like this, as it reinforces the weight of our choices AND he gets to feel appreciated for the breadth of work he does to prepare)
Hopefully we as designers can let go of that same kind of unhealthy attachment to expected outcomes that are not essential to our game’s core experience.
Darren Torpey
April 9, 2009 at 8:27 am
@Chris I think that’s exactly right. Planescape: Torment is a candidate for my favourite game and a large part of that is because Sigil is such an amazing and unique place. And despite Torment having such depth, it’s still relatively focused. There’s a wealth of information about the Planescape setting that wasn’t included and rightly so, I think.
The other thing is, context matters a lot. An RPG like Torment is all about the world, its inhabitants and their stories. And like you said, it’s also framed as a mystery. Shooter like Fracture or Killzone 2 (or even Gears of War) are explicitly *not* about those things. Their essence is action gameplay.
@Darren That’s one thing I’d like to see people take away from these conservation- creating smaller, more meaningful stories does not necessarily mean being less creative or doing less worldbuilding. It just means that instead of shoving your tome in the player’s face, and in the least game-like way possible, it serves to inform the team when it comes to producing the content the player’s will interact with. That rich backstory will be implicit and more subtle, but if we can do it right, will be more engaging than a holding something in front of the player’s face and screaming, “Pay attention to this!”
Nels Anderson
April 9, 2009 at 11:00 am
I had no idea Vampire Rain was a triple-A title…
As for cut scenes, I really enjoy them, however, I continue to be repelled by the idea of sitting through 90-minute cinematics like those found in MGS4 just to get the full story. It really does run counter to the idea of experiencing an interactive medium when you’re just sitting there passively taking in what must surely just come across as a third-rate feature film.
It’s indulgent. Bloated or excessive cinematics remind me of tyrannical film directors who hijack the editing room and put out a borring 3 hour version of what could’ve been easily a nice 90-minute masterpiece of a movie.
Clinton
April 17, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I don’t take a blanket view of hating cutscenes. The ones in Beyond Good and Evil were excellent. The ones in Guild Wars were not. The cutscenes in Knights of the Old Republic were of varying quality, but I didn’t mind them.
It’s worth throwing in a plug for Unskippable here. They do hilarious MST3K commentary for some truly horrible cutscenes. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/unskippable
James
April 19, 2009 at 12:28 am
интересно было прочитать.
Ferinannnd
May 25, 2009 at 1:05 am
I am on the fence about cutscenes. I loved them in Lost Odyssey and Fallout 3, but I absolutely hated them in Tales of Vesperia and Mass Effect. I kept thinking, “Come on. . . I just want to play the game!”. I think that the industry could make them better, as long as they do not turn them all into quick time events.
I just wanted to say that I really enjoy reading your blog. Being a gamer and my husband a programmer and gamer, I like hearing intelligent conversation about the industry and games (rather than “dude, that sucks!”).
jillofalltirades
June 17, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Jillofalltirades – Hey, thanks! I really appreciate it.
savetherobot
June 18, 2009 at 9:03 pm