Rethinking Story Games
"Adventure game with no puzzles like train with no wheels...very soon get nowhere fast."---Ancient Chinese Proverb
The "adventure game" has died. Don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Sure LucasArts, the company that owned the genre, can get away with releasing the occasional adventure game, but that's the exception, not the rule. This fact makes a great many people sad, myself included, because much more than any other genre, the adventure game was about story. The digital, interactive medium offers amazing potential to tell stories in ways never before possible, so when the genre explicitly about storytelling died...authors either mourned the passing or denied it completely.
The message the market is telling us is certainly not that they don't want story games, it's just that they don't want "adventure games" and all the rules that go along with them. So, what is an adventure game? It's a story through which the player navigates, taking on the role of one character (or occasionally multiple characters). The story is a gated one, and the puzzles are the gates. In order to progress to new sections of the story, the player must complete tasks and solve puzzles. Since solving puzzles (by their very nature) require the player to think and explore possibilities, adventure games also allow (or force?) the player to wander around the world, talking to characters, picking up objects, amusing themselves until the moment of "aha!" that allows them to progress. In the vast majority of these games, time does not actually pass in any meaningful way. That concept is at odds with solving puzzles, unless events repeat or the player is allowed to travel through time. The result is often a rather empty experience. A large percentage of the game is spent wandering around in a static world, often paused in time, while the player figures out what to do. His reward is the advancement of the story.
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| The Secret of Monkey Island, though formulaic, inspired me to join the game industry. Excellent comedy writing, and great characters. |
Now, I used to love this type of game. I love puzzles. To me, the process of solving puzzles was where much of the fun was. But the genre soon became rather puzzle-stale. Ingenious puzzles are difficult to craft, and the concept of walking around, talking to people, collecting inventory, and using items on each other only goes so far. These games were often forced, in search of variety, to present "puzzles" which went way beyond the realm of lateral thinking and into the realm of the arbitrary. In short, the basic construct of this type of game needs to change for puzzle writing's sake, if nothing else.
That's not the worst of it, though. Even with well crafted puzzles, adventure games have an awful lot of emptiness to them. Exploring a static world frozen in time is just not up to snuff these days. There are only so many lines of dialogue characters can have. Heck, Myst didn't have any dialogue or even any characters to entertain the wandering, stuck player That was fun back when 3D rendered images on a CD were innovative. Games like the Curse of Monkey Island try to minimize this emptiness writing damn funny dialogue to entertain you while you're stuck. But again, that only goes so far. I was willing to put up with the excruciatingly slow pace of adventure games as a kid, when then genre was fresh, but nowadays, it just doesn't seem like something I should have deal with. After all, stories are not, by nature, always slow paced.
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| Myst was fun back then. These days, it takes more than an empty world of still images and zero characters. |
And remember, the story advancement is the reward in the adventure game formula. But if the genre is really about stories, then shouldn't the story be the meat of the game, not the reward for solving puzzles? Why do we need puzzles at all? The answer is that no one has really been able to figure how to make a game out of a story. (Yes, the role-playing game (RPG) is a different take on this, but it too is trapped in formula. And yes, Metal Gear Solid manages to have a story gated by action rather than actual puzzles...but work with me here, people.)
Let's look at how long it takes to play an adventure game. Well, it depends greatly on how able you are to succeed at the game elements along the way. It could take only 2 hours if you know exactly how to do everything (meaning you have a detailed walkthru from the net), or it could take 60 hours. In fact, it could take an expert gamer 60 hours, even though the actual length of real story might be as short as an hour or two. Would my mom want to play this type of game? Absolutely not. She might enjoy the story, but she'd never survive the huge time commitment. If it takes me 60 hours, how long would it take her? She also wouldn't appreciate the duration being directly tied to her skill at the game. She, as a non-gamer, is familiar with the concept of a tv show being a half hour long, a movie being two hours, a book being 300 pages, and so on. It's easy to understand where these types of entertainment fit in your real life schedule since they have predetermined, relatively short lengths.
What's the point of all this? The point is to figure out a way to create a story game that is much more about story than we've been able to pull of so far. I think the point is to also think a great deal about the mass market. The concept of storytelling is so fundamental to all cultures that it just seems a shame that our most story based genre of games are not accessible to non-gamers.
A "Forced Advance" Game
Here's my idea: the game plays itself. If the player does nothing---touches no game controls---then the characters will go about their business, time will progress, and a predefined story with a beginning, middle, and end will be told. This will take some predictable amount of time. (Perhaps 10 minutes, or 30, or 2 hours, or whatever the designer chooses.) Sounds like a movie, doesn't it? Well, the player doesn't have to sit and watch. He can intervene at any time and change the course of events. I certainly don't mean there's x minutes of full motion video, then a canned decision point, then more fmv. I'm talking about something much more fluid. More of a simulation.
While the player will see a story without intervening, he won't necessarily see the most interesting one. If the player's character had stuck around and talked to crazy Aunt Hilda a little longer, he might have realized why she had that magical locket in her attic that her daughter stumbled across. That Hilda actually put the locket there on purpose. That Hilda isn't that crazy after all. Puts a new light on the story, doesn't it? So one facet of this type of game is being able to explore different threads of the story as you desire.
There's also the concept of changing the course of the story. I can imagine one type of "game" in which the player is completely unable to change the storyline. The "game" is the (disembodied?) navigation through the physical game world, through time, and through the entangled web of the plot. Every object and character in every scene might have it's own story to explore, all related, all hyperlinked together in a sense. This is, I believe, what "interactive fiction" in games would be like. There really is no game element, but interaction with the story is so extreme that it at least has something in common with games.
Another route is to allow the player to affect the course of events, or at least to try. This might mean trying to convince characters to behave in a certain way through conversation. It might mean taking specific action in the world to try to change things, such as firing a weapon or moving objects around. Perhaps it's even possible to create traps (Spy vs. Spy comes to mind). The player might be in a position of power (police chief, ship captain, etc.) and easily influence events. Such a game world would probably have to be very resistant to change, though. It's probably not technically feasible to allow different outcomes to branch into a huge tree of totally different stories, nor is it even desirable. The opponents of interactive fiction state that any story is really 1,000 possible stories where the author intelligently chose the one, single best story to tell. It would still be possible, though, to create a game world whose major story arc was resistant to change, while allowing change on the smaller scale. It might even be fun.
Let's look at two specific types of stories that work well with this concept: the mystery story and the horror story.
The great thing about a mystery is that it's kind of like a game to begin with. It's a story that's one big puzzle. It's also not a zero-sum game. It's not author vs. reader. The author wants the reader to "win" in the end by figuring out the puzzle just before the answer is revealed. He does this by hiding clues through out the story, which is the other great feature of a mystery. Trying to find the clues in a mystery is a game-like activity, and a rather forgiving one. The reader doesn't have to find all the clues. He's able to progress through the story and follow it at every step whether he finds every clue, or no clues at all.
A mystery is really two stories in one. One is the story right in the forefront. The story we travel through as we would any other. But characters of this story are trying to uncover the second story---the secret story---of what actually happened. Who was the real killer? How was the diamond stolen? In the timeline, this second story usually finishes before the first story begins. The key feature here, though, is that progressing through the first story is not dependant on uncovering the clues which clarify the secret story. The secret story will be explained in the end, and hopefully the reader can look back and see where the clues were at that time.
So back to our game. The game plays itself and the events of the mystery (the investigation) unfold. Witnesses are questioned, the main character's safety is threatened, the zany next door neighbor is exposed to be an adulterer, but not a murder, and so on and so on. It's a story. Through the story are hidden clues, cleverly hidden off the beaten path. Maybe the player should talk to the pharmacist a little bit longer before giving up so easily. Maybe he should make young Miss Weatherby stay the night at the police station rather than risk her being kidnapped. Maybe allowing the main character's default action of going to investigate the crime scene isn't the best thing to do. If he chases after that suspicious character on the street he might end up learning something.
These clues are basically just like the DK coins in the action platform game Donkey Kong Country 2 (see my article on that game). They don't have to be found, but they are there to challenge the player. No matter how good or bad a player you are, you'll get to the end of the story (in a fairly known amount of time) and the mystery will be solved, though perhaps not by your character. But if you're able to find enough clues (DK coins), then you have the satisfying ending of solving the mystery yourself. Notice that this is an example of a larger story arc that is unchangeable by the player. No matter what the player does, Jimmy the Locksmith will still be the murderer. Minor events along the way (do you lose the game of 3-card monte to the street thugs?) and the ending (do you unmask the killer or did your sidekick) are flexible.
One problem with this type of game is the pacing. Being forced to advance through the story, never having a break might not be the most fun experience. As I talked about in my article on pacing, having a rising and falling sine wave of action is nice thing. Juxtaposing the highs with the lows give each a little more punch. So what if...parts of a game are in this "forced advance" mode we've been talking about, and parts are more like the traditional type of adventure game? The regular parts would have a feeling of safety, really, since the time pressure would be gone, allowing you to explore at your leisure, and perhaps even give you enough time to solve some actual thought puzzles.
And here we have the classic formula for the horror story. Parts of the story (the non-forced advance parts) are safe zones, and slow-paced. Interspersed are the tense parts---the parts where you are forced to act---forced to go forward---forced into the unknown. Furthermore, during these parts, you have a feeling of lack of control, just as you should in horror. If done well, the universe might even seem to be an entity, bending you to its will. In fact, I even created a design for such a game where the villain is a demon who has the power to beckon to the main character, forcing her to act, to progress. She has enough control to choose how she progresses (does she jump or crawl or draw her weapon?) but not enough control to resist. And boy, does that demon show up at inopportune times!
This horror game I've described, though based on the same forced-advance mechanic as the mystery game, is really of very different character. In the horror game I worked on, a great deal of the gameplay comes from the action elements caused by the forced advance. The character is forced across dangerous and scary territory. She must jump and shoot and swim and so forth to survive. During the regular parts of the game, she can carefully explore territory or story threads, find secrets at he leisure, stock up on weaponry, etc. These are the calm parts, and the forced-advance sections are the tense parts. Really, it's more of a "game" in the sense gamers are used to than the mystery I described.
The mystery allowed the player to be swept through a story while simultaneously exploring the story itself, trying to find the hidden parts of it, rather than concentrating at all on jumping or shooting or any other traditional "gamer" activities. The horror game spices up the pacing of more traditional game forms with an interesting mechanic.
Through these examples I hope I have scratched the surface of new ways to tell stories in video games. I truly look forward someday to turning such theory into practice, and to others advancing this still-infant art form.
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| This screenshot of The Curse of Monkey Island is purely gratuitous. Ever notice how Guybrush goes to a beach with a rowboat in every game? |
February 28th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Perhaps you could have a realtime storyline where the events unfold over a couple of realtime days, so whenever you are in each location you have essentially as much time as you like (unless you’re in a moment of high action - “get to the crime scene immediately, they’re getting away!). Time taken travelling from place to place would be more significant chunks of time that would pass by instantly; “It takes an hour to get to the town centre”.
You could then have to coordinate with regular events (”the guard changes at 3pm”) and other people travelling from place to place (”meet me at the coffee shop at 8″). Perhaps even setting your alarm clock at different times could be a trade off between recuperation and more time to do things.
February 28th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
It looks like many things were used in “Farhenheit/The Indigo Prophecy” through the mystery theory.
March 1st, 2006 at 10:58 pm
A few old games used a almost-realtime system (Maupiti Island for example) that lets you examine as much as you want in realtime and only simulates traveling by skipping the appropriate amount of time. In these games you couldn’t change what happened but you could learn new things by being at the right place, at the right time. The only problem is that they *required* multiple replays in order to solve the mystery in an omniscient fashion.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:08 am
What we really need are video games that strive to make us feel the same way the character in the game feels. Knights of the Old Republic did this beautifully by presenting us with moral questioning throughout the game. If the video game industry is to improve, more games like KOTOR will have to be made.
May 3rd, 2006 at 12:10 pm
This article made me think of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. For the experienced gamer many of the game elements do, effectively, play themselves. I’m so used to navigating menus and ‘talking’ to characters from playing other games that a lot of the game was effortless, I was as close to ‘watching’ events unfold as I could be. However, there were some fantastic moments of deduction where I couldn’t be on autopilot. One of the things that is great about Phoenix Wright is that these moments would likely be different for different gamers as some things would be obvious and some less so.
Interestingly, Phoenix Wright fits the ‘mystery’ archetype quite well, it definitely has the dual story thing going on, the one you are in and the one that has happened. If you haven’t played it, do so.
Ed, what you describe reminds me of Shenmue. It’s very close in fact. Shenmue isn’t realtime but you do have to, for example, “coordinate with regular events” as you describe.
Daniel, I think you’re missing the point. Feeling the same way the character feels is something games can do but this article is about using games to tell stories, striving to a degree of effectiveness that other mediums offer. I think telling a story in a game may be even harder than making you feel the same way the character feels. The interactivity helps in the case of making the player feel how the character does but it hinders the telling of a story. It’s difficult.
May 4th, 2006 at 2:39 am
The template for the horror game you mentioned was partly done in 2001, in Silent Hill 2 with Pyramid Head’s appearences and again in 2004 in SH4 with the way Walter would turn up just when you really didn’t need him to. So either people have been reading your articles, or the adventure game is naturally moving in the way you invisiged. Though, the idea of a world progressing through time regardless of whether the player does anything or not was nailed in the early nineties with the Dynamix/Sierra games; “Rise of the Dragon” and “Heart of China” which gave very specific timeframes for the player to solve the riddles included therein.
However, putting the two ideas together has yet to be done and this is probably due to the fact that it is really no mean feat to create a persistant and interactive world. A “real world” example of the amount of work needed to do so is a MMOG, where the user has to pay some kind of fee towards updates, etc.
Just my two cents, but your article motivated me to write…
May 21st, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Your “Horror” Archetype reminds me of the SNES game “Clocktower.” It was a fairly straightforeward Adventure game and was paced as such, but when you were found by the “Slasher” You had to run to one of the predefined “Safe Zones” or merely outrun him, forcing you and sometimes herding you towards favorable and unfavorable areas. Also, that game had a prescribed time of Three hours. If you tried to finish the game before the three hours was up (I think thats the condition at least), the slasher would kill you in the elevator and you would get the worst ending, so it flew entirely in the face of traditional “Time limit” rules of video games.
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:27 am
I don’t know if you still keep this site updated. It seems to be somehow left abandoned, but yet I desire to leave a comment anyway. I didn’t play Fable myself, but I heard that it was built in such a way that if you decide to kill a person it will affect the outcome of the game somehow. Is it what you intended to envision?
July 4th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
What do you think of oblivion?
August 6th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
That story idea is too good, just too good…
September 21st, 2006 at 9:00 pm
There is this experiment in something similar, called Facade. It is (if I recall correctly) freeware. It is a big download and I haven’t got round to grab it and “play” it yet (no time), but the concept seemed very interesting to me so I definitively want to try it out one of these days.
I quickly found it with a google search, here it is
http://interactivestory.net/
October 16th, 2006 at 2:20 am
Something else you might want to look at, are the visual novels that are typically published only in japanese, however some get translated or released in english.
These ‘games’ are generally nothing but a story presented through the eyes of the main character, and shown with pictures and music. Most of these novels also have some sort of interactivity, with the player choosing different speech or action options for the character, and eventually branching off into different endings.
This is probably something close to what you’re describing with an interactive story.
If you want to look further into it, the game “Ever 17″, is a jap visual novel that has been released in english as well. One of the best games I’ve ever played :P
June 21st, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I’ve not read all the comments suggested, but apart from including time expended to explore/travel (which should ideally not be pressurising, just present), you could also have the player trigger, or at least have the possibility of triggering, a pseudo-real-time event. In these events the actions of the player at the time count, the choices may mean the difference between a discovery or their survival or innumerous other things. This may well be what you were getting at in your article, but I wasn’t certain, so I thought I would add my views.
June 28th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I cannot completely commit to Camp 1 as I do think there are times, and situations, where users have to take responsibility for their own choices. For example, if someone choses to remain on dialup when higher speed connections are available, and within their reach, I do not think I should be obliged to design with their free choice in mind. If they choose to stay with an older browser rather than upgrade, why should I have to take that into account? To do so would constrain design and possibly compromise the experience of others for no good reason. http://www.managehairloss.com
July 19th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
The adventure game market may have died, but the adventure game community hasn’t. check it out, they’ve done dozens of free to download adventure games.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
here’s one I recommend:
http://new.bigbluecup.com/games.php?action=detail&id=688
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delete that last post of mine please
August 22nd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
This is a late time to post, but, hey:
Videogames currently operate under the ethos that the player is the one who should be emotionally affected; the player is to feel scared, the player is to feel delighted, etc.
However, stories tend to operate in a more complex fashion. In a novel or film we observe a character. We empathize with the character, and thus are scared for them, delighted for them, etc. Something happens to the character, which affects the character emotionally, which then affects us emotionally, because we care about the character enough to empathize with them.
Occasionally, we who are outside the story may experience emotions not felt by the characters, by dramatic irony, or by distancing effects like a main character who is not sympathetic, and who we judge negatively. This is even more complex, because it relies upon characters who have our empathy (in the former) or who are written as if they should (in the latter).
I think if videogames are to tell fully engrossing stories, they will have to find a way to tell stories about full characters whom the player then empathizes with. However, this empathy is stronger than other forms of story because the player is in control, and thus responsible for the emotional affect upon the character.
Which is to say that the storytelling equation of videogames is:
‘I am responsible for making the character feel [emotion], and that makes me feel [emotion].’
January 6th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Phoenix Wright says adventure games aren’t completely dead.
But this is a good articale. Your idea sounds great, actually I think I’ve seen it done ina Zapdramatic game called “Angry Nieghbours”(I might have mispelt that). You can find it on Newgrounds.
You play as a mediator between 2 arguing neighbours. During the game these 2 will start talking, and eventually start arguing. At any point you can jump in an interrupt. If you don’t, they keep ont alking, though the argument escaltes until you can’t jump in and yo get a game over. To win the game you have to figur eout when to jump in, and when to let them work things out. But its often quite amusing letting them fight
February 19th, 2008 at 9:04 am
I can think of at least one game that actually operates almost exactly the way that is described here, and it is indeed a mystery game: The Colonel’s Bequest by Sierra Online (back in their day the true owners of the adventure game). game time passed more or less keyed to the amount of real time spent playing, so if you just didn’t die long enough you would get to the end, but you wouldn’t necessarily see the same story as if you had been cleverer about poking around. It was bloody impossible to find everything in one or even a few play throughs, especially since there were time dependencies (other characters moving about and having different conversations depending on when you talked to them, so if you were off doing something else you might miss a clue, in fact I think there were some plot points that were mutually exclusive for a single play through since they occured at the same time but different places). The sequel, the dagger of amen ra. was more popular and probably behaved similarly, but is one of the few sierra games I never got around to playing.
February 19th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Paul: Well, two or three games in a series isn’t really enough. I mean, when Sirlin wrote it, he mentioned that LucasArts occassionally released something, but one or two full games a year doesn’t make much of a difference.
That being said, there has been a big change, in that adventure puzzle games have found a new scene to prosper in: As small, often free Flash games on the internet. Pursuit, The Red Room, Submarine, Escape, Samorost The Mystery of Time and Space, etc. etc. have given a new outlet that suits the genre much better, mainly because the time spent on solving these puzzles are limited to just a couple of hours.
And making these games small is in fact a major contributor to their success. The reason such games do well is because you have freedom to play around with a mosly relaxing point&click interface (making it easier to simply take a break playing when the boss comes around) to make things you wouldn’t be allowed to. Grow Cube, for example is a silly little thing. It’s too random and relying on memorisation and lots of trial&error to be made a big game out of, or even being put inside as part of a bigger game, where you need to succeed to either move on in the main game, or even get a reward (some neat item or whatnot).
But as a complete diversion for 10 minutes up to two hours, it works perfectly, and by thinking of this new breed of adventure games as diversions, one has the freedom to put in new mechanics, knowing that even if the gamer doesn’t like it, he won’t have invested much time (and no money) in the game, and therefore aren’t prone to feel insulted. He’ll instead just move on to the next game, or the boss will yell at him to get off his ass (metaphorically) and do those damn spreadsheets already.
And the way Telltale Games now release Sam and Max as episodes, with smaller chunks of gameplay should indicate that they too know that adventure gaming needs to be bite-sized snacks, not an entire meal.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
This made me think back on star control 2 (from 1990). It’s source code was released and it is now maintained at http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
In star control the world moves at a semi slow pace, evens occur. You can nudge events to go a different, more desirable to you way; you can also trigger events that change the way the universe is going. All the while acquiring items, allies, and knowledge. The game ends either when the big calamity sweeps through and almost everyone dies. Or when you successfully intercept it and prevent it from happening.
I would describe it in a better, more appealing way, but it would spoil the story to those who are not familiar with this excellent game. I might have said too much already.
June 7th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
You mean something like Zelda Majora’s mask?
July 1st, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Your article reminded me of an old old game for the 3DO - <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_Detective_%28video_game%29″>Psychic Detective.</a> I think it was also for the PS1.
In Psychic Detective, which came on 3 cds, you watch a live action movie, from a 1st person veiwpoint, of a detective wandering around a party talking to various people and trying to solve a mystery. At any time during the sequence you can hit a button and “hitchike” into the mind of the person you’re talking to, putting your body on autopilot, and then you watch a portion or the remainder of the night from that person’s point of view, hopefully gathering clues about the mystery along the way.
It’s partly what you’re describing; you can sit back and watch on autopilot if you’d like but you won’t solve the mystery by the end. It was an interesting premise, though not overly well executed. It’d be interesting to see someone expand on this concept.
Thanks for all you do, and keep up the great work!
July 13th, 2008 at 1:26 am
The Last Express is the mystery variant of what you want, if I understand you aright