The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety

Why games need less externally imposed story (guest post by Justin Marks)

Editor's note: The following post is by film and videogame writer and friend of The Cut Scene Justin Marks. He wrote previously about his time modding "Halo 3" during the writers' strike and why Hollywood's isn't actually pissing all over our favorite games. All the opinions are his, especially the parts disagreeing with me.

My friend Ben Fritz, who writes for Variety.com's videogame blog The Cut Scene, had an interesting bone to pick recently with "Grand Theft Auto IV." In an essay titled "Narrative sophistication vs. open world," he mentioned the ever-present problem in these sandbox games when it comes to balancing a confined story with the fact that you can literally do just about anything:

How can players seriously believe Niko’s on a date when his girlfriend doesn’t mind that he’s carrying a knife, walking her through a 5-foot-deep pond and getting in numerous car accidents? Why can a distinctive-looking illegal immigrant commit hundreds of carjackings and nobody seems to care?

Basically, Ben is bothered by the fact that while you can do anything in the open world environment, the story actually operates on a very set track, going from plot point to plot point as if no one in Liberty City had any idea that you just spent the last two hours initiating a five-star police chase that culminated in your plunging a car off a bridge and then swimming back to a safe house. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated open world where Liberty City actually feels like a living and breathing universe, the game's rigid narrative structure is becoming a bit, well... tired.

But I don't mind the fact that "GTA's" gameplay sometimes bounces up against the narrative.  The question I want to explore is this: Why does my gameplay have to be constantly interrupted by this reductive thing called a story?

STORY AS ACCESSORY

Before we begin, let's call a spade a spade here. It's been a few weeks, we've all had a little perspective, and I think it's fair to admit that the game press may have jumped the gun a bit on their exuberance for "Grand Theft Auto IV's" storyline. Simon Parkin, in his Chewing Pixels column, was even bold enough to come clean about his hyperbole.  It's not, as IGN amazingly called it, "Oscar-caliber." The adventure of Niko Bellic, complete with its comic assortment of ethnic cliches, is pretty much on par with the rest of the franchise's self-conscious worship of movie archetypes and genre tropes. And there's nothing wrong with that. Rockstar has made clear that's all they've ever wanted to do, and they've done a damn fine job at that (although I do miss some of that charming humor from "Vice City" and "San Andreas"). 

The problem here is not the quality of the story, but the manner in which it is incorporated into the gameplay.  After skipping over countless cut scenes so I could get to the action, I slowly began to regard plot in "GTA IV" as being something akin to the Clinton marriage: why do they bother with the charade? Is there anyone in this country who honestly thinks these two people still sleep in the same bed?  After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory -- a needless, comparatively inferior element?

More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?

THE "STAR WARS" ARCADE DAYS

In Jesper Juul's July 2001 essay "Games Telling Stories?," he discusses Atari's 1983 arcade version of "Star Wars," which utilized moving polygons in a flight simulator engine to re-create the famous third act of the movie:

The primary thing that encourages the player to connect game and movie is the title "Star Wars" on the machine and on the screen. If we imagine the title removed from the game, the connection would not be at all obvious. It would be a game where one should hit an "exhaust port" (or simply a square), and the player could note a similarity with a scene in Star Wars, but you would not be able to reconstruct the events in the movie from the game. The prehistory is missing, the rest of the movie, all personal relations.

In other words, he's saying that in the early days of limited graphics and reduced processing power, games had to resort to external packaging to inform the user as to what kind of world the narrative was taking place in. Strip away those accessories --- the words "Star Wars" on the outside of the console, the X-Wing-like cockpit, Obi Wan's voice playing on the speakers behind us --- and all you have is an abstract shooter involving lines and polygons. It could just as easily have been a game version of "The Last Starfighter" or even "Top Gun."  Story was simply an excuse to charge the gameplay with more meaning.

"GTA IV" AND "PORTAL"

But here we are today, in the era of the Playstation 3, and clearly we've got enough processing power to handle a firm integration of narrative and gameplay. Story must exist on a much more sophisticated level, right?

Not as much as you'd think.

Writers, executives, developers discuss whether videogames need writers

Not meaning to make today the day of guest posts, but I wanted to post a really interesting discussion that occurred on an e-mail group I'm a part of that involves gamers and Hollywood types. This one spun out of the infamous "Case against writers in the game industry" posted by Adam Maxwell at GamaSutra.

As a writer myself, you can probably imagine I'm not too sympathetic to Maxwell's argument. In fact, I think I make it a point in my reviews to focus on story, characters, humor and themes, much more than other game reviewers. Perhaps that's why I'm a little more positive in my reviews of titles like "Kane and Lynch" and "The Simpsons Game" and a little harder on "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Rainbow Six Vegas 2" than most other critics.

But let's hear what some other smart people had to say. Everyone involved gave me permission to copy their posts, without identifying information, of course. Some are edited a bit for space, non-pertinent info, etc.:

Michael Strode (writer):

All your base are belong to us.

The article's author clearly prefers sandbox-style games, and that's fine, but even the broadest sandbox game needs a central spine, something to feel like you're achieving a main goal (having finally finished Oblivion after 280 hours, I feel qualified to speak to that).  The author calls Bioshock a "railroaded experience."  Railroaded into a series of fantastic plot twists?  Without the quality writing in Oblivion, would I have felt guilty about acting in a way that led to a minor character's death?  I actually
felt guilty!  Sure, I'm not a fan of interminable cutscenes, but the solution to that is to integrate the plot almost entirely into the gameplay (as with Bioshock), not to ditch the writer who came up with the plot,
characters, and dialogue.

My two cents as non-videogame writer.

Kellee Santiago (video game developer):

I'm a video game designer, and even I think this article is bullshit.

We've pulled in a writer on our current project, and for sure it has made a world of difference. Maybe the term "screenwriter" should revert to its true root: "storyteller," but either way, it's someone who specializes in crafting emotion. I think the games industry hasn't been using writers to their full capacity in simply giving them cut scenes and slots for dialogue to fill in.  Was Portal nominated for Best Writing just because of the voice over during the game? I don't think so. I think it was because of the combination
of the environment design, the voice-over, the signs on the wall, and the weighted companion cube. A writer knew how to pull all of the elements together to craft an experience.

My two cents as a video game designer.

Zach Schiff-Abrams (film development/production executive):

As a film producer I have drawn and quartered many a writer so usually I leap at the chance to jump on any bandwagon that is founded on lynching the writing community. Unfortunately this retard doesn't know his ass from his elbow, so here's my 15 cents:

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot."  Here's what's inherently wrong with this moron's argument.  Ask any self-respecting writer(and every fucking last one of them motherfuckers are self-respecting) what they do when they sit down to build a story and they'll tell you the first thing (and the most important thing) they do is create characters.  In fact, most good stories in any medium usually come from a landscape where the writer almost obsessively focuses on creating and developing characters in a vacuum that doesn't rely on any plot.  There are no good fucking plots, there are only interesting characters that inform a plot...

What I have been arguing for years upon years is that videogames desperately need more writing.  And now we're finally at a level technologically speaking where we can actually integrate the creation of character into the very fabric of the gameplay experience.  You still argue?  You think GTA is a successful franchise?  Think how much more successful it would actually be if Alvin Sargent or Jonathan Lethem was taking seriously the creation of character in that world?  Then you wouldn't have Fritzy writing about how videogames are challenging movies for the media dollar, then my nerdy friends, then there wouldn't be any more movies.

Instead you have this dweeb and unfortunately way too many of his kind running the videogame industry that think in way too small of a box.   

Justin Marks (screenwriter):

Yeah as a movie and occasional game writer obviously I find these arguments patently absurd, but then I have to realize this is still a business in such a mainstream narrative infancy that critics hail Mass   
Effect for having a great story simply because it has a story at all. Meanwhile, Portal introduces so many narrative innovations it could make a filmmaker's head spin and few people notice (ie, Halo 3 still   
tops most people's lists last year).

The amazing thing to me is the way the gaming press, Mr. Fritz excluded of course, heralds how "emotional" a game like Mass Effect is just because you can visually see emotions on the characters' faces. Basically they're saying that emotional response has a direct correlation to how realistic the graphics are, while missing the point completely that we were way more attached to the Companion Cube or Agro the Horse from Shadow of the Colossus than we will ever be to some hot alien lesbian with a well-rendered face.  And that's all a direct result of story.  Movies learned a long time ago what makes characters sympathetic.  When will games learn that character empathy (ie, turning us into one of the players in the story) is entirely different from sympathy (ie, showing us why we should care about the people we're watching)?

Until then nothing shocks me. I still think there are a lot of developers out there who are starting to get it.  The sad thing is, Maxwell is kind of right.  The way most developers hire writers, they do serve a pointless role.  That's not fault of the writer.  Big publisher-based developers have got to get over the whole practice of throwing a lot of money at a screenwriter and then just having them sit down and write dialogue.  Of course they're going to be useless when they're applied that way.  Nobody plays a game for the dialogue.  Writers don't have a magic touch because they've got to fill in a few story blanks to get you from one boss to another.  They bring what they can to the table as storytellers, and deserve a place next to any game designer.

Anyway, obviously a touchy subject for me, but my two cents from what I've seen.