Your favorite game’s “awesome story” merely goes through the motions when portraying conflict
The protagonist mulls over destroying the food supply of an entire town to gain some strategic advantage. The team pipes in: “Are we really doing this?”, Alice asks; “I guess there is no other way,” Bob sighs, and that’s that. Once the deed is done the town mayor’s elite guard chases the team and shouts: “You will pay for this!”. The chase sequence is over. Total casualties: twenty people, and seventy thousand more in a month or so. The incident is brought up exactly once later in the game, where Alice notes that “we maybe overdid it blowing up that food supply”. The game is full of this kind of stuff, and is hailed as “exciting” and “eventful”.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” is carried by an episodic plot
This is a flaw so old and so pervasive that Aristotle complained about it: just one thing after the other. Oh no, we’ve got to hit the road! Oh no, the chariot broke. Need to get spare parts. Oh no, the nearby village is full of killer robots… Oh no, the killer robot repellent stocks are in the next village over… Oh no, the people of the next village over are starving and hostile… Oh no, all the emergency food rations have been claimed by bandits, and the bandit leader refuses to negotiate on account of the roadblock to the southeast, etc, etc, etc…
Now of course this is less of a problem if the audience is at least forced to concede “wow, that was some experience dealing with the chariot breakage”, “wow, that was some experience getting the spare parts”, “wow, that was some experience dealing with the killer robots”. But in practice stories are often built this way in a futile effort to achieve a magic gestalt effect where a sequence of forgettable episodes is somehow more than the sum of its parts.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” is one of those pieces of ‘environmental storytelling’
Imagine a person who claims that in terms of pure gameplay mechanics, walking simulators are generally superior to soulslikes. They explain that it’s exactly the fact that walking simulators do not involve strategic decision making, hair-trigger reaction times, or skill with controller input, that makes them typically such a master class in mechanical design. Because you see, these things are all crutches, and the superior philosophy is for the game mechanics to engage with the player without relying on these crutches, as the typical walking simulator does.
This is what it sounds like to me when someone extols the virtues of the “amazing story” in a game where none of the characters have friends, families, conversations, goals, fears, or first names. At that point you’re way past “less is more”, you’re practicing narrative homeopathy. I’ll grant maybe the game is a compelling piece of art, and that’s something different.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency
It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” is a 5-hour affair fit into 50 hours
Half a book page’s worth of plot. 4 sidequests, 10 errands, 80 points of interest, 3 broken bridges, 2 days of real time. Half a book page’s worth of plot. Repeat.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” falls apart the moment you try to put yourself in any character’s shoes and consider their supposed motives and means
There isn’t a dull moment: backup plans are revealed, friendships are made and ruined, alliances are brokered and broken, bold gambits are attempted and thwarted. But wait, didn’t Alice swear to destroy her father’s company? So why did she agree to call in a favor with that elite mercenary unit last mission, when we decided to run a crucial errand that helped stabilize the same company? And where were these mercenaries back in mission 1 the moment things went south and we were surrounded by 30 armed bad guys? Also, isn’t this the third time already that Eve’s changed her allegiance? At this point the Nutella conspiracy that she is orchestrating goes, what, four levels deep, and she has been able to act perfectly and maintain the deception for each level so far until revealing the next?.. “We will bypass the front security using this special security-bypasser that I have assembled for this mission”, says Qarxas the alien; this useful contraption has never been brought up before, and will never be brought up again. See also: mind control, parallel universes, get-out-of-death-free cards and time travel. Of this, H. G. Wells famously said: “If anything is possible, nothing is interesting”.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” at its core has, let’s be tactful and say a pathological fixation on things as opposed to people
The story’s central conflict is fundamentally and entirely about the nuke and the facility and the energy field and the virus and the organization and the protocol etc etc. The people are set pieces; at best they get to momentarily be people while caught up in all the above, at worst not even that.
For some reason sequels are extra eager to walk into this trap, thinking the energy field and the virus are what made the original so compelling, so this time let’s have the story revolve around 3 energy fields and 8 viruses. Actually what made the original so compelling was the distraught scientist who worked herself half to death on a vaccine and got all the players to root for her because hey this is just like that time they pulled 3 all nighters in a row on that project. Unfortunately the sequel kills her two minutes into the intro, so as to establish that virus #6 is not fucking around and everyone is in really serious danger this time.
Your favorite game’s “awesome story” is just a bunch of jerks speaking in riddles over and over
Come, friend; it’s time that all questions be finally answered, and all mice go back to their holes, and the mighty be brought low. Or were we ever friends at all? Are you going to surrender to these doubts or push through, like a mother pushes through when she gives the gift of life? Can we break free of the past? Can we forge a future? Have you stopped to consider whether we should? What price are you willing to pay to make that happen? Can you tell the difference between good and evil? Truth and fabrication? Competent prose and whatever the hell this is?
I feel like it would’ve made sense to include some real examples. Otherwise this just reads very… made up? :'D
Not sure how to explain, but the simplistic nature of the stories you use as examples make the whole text feel a bit like an angry strawman argument even though it probably makes some good points.
yeah it’s kind of a weird post with the way it’s all worded. framing it in a “why what you like is wrong” way probably hurts it more than anything. it doesn’t invite discussion and is more or less just a ranting if you’re not giving examples.
it’s not like anyone here is trying to force someone to like the same games they do and the first thought I had after reading was “okay…”
Personally I like all sorts of storytelling as long as it’s involving topics/genres I’m interested. Lovecraftian setting? inject it into my veins. stories about realistic depictions of depression and suicide - sign me up. There’s not a singular formula that all my favorite games need to adhere to - why would anyone want all their story structures to be so rigid and similar?
Anyways one of my favorite games, probably my overall favorite, is Control. It does a lot of ‘show, don’t tell’ while also having an incredible amount of world building there for you to engage with if you’re interested. The setting is like they tailor-made this for my interests. So pumped for the other games coming out in that universe
It’s like a TV Tropes page without the examples.
Yeah… I kind of… don’t get the point of this post.
Ok, so… you don’t like a bunch of stuff. Examples?
And what do you like? No game stories at all?
I agree that video game narratives are, on average, way worse than in other media, but… This post is like a script for a CinemaSins video on an entire medium. There’s a conversation to be had about the quality and originality of storytelling in video games and why gamers are so quick to praise mediocre narratives, but I dunno if glib one-paragraph summaries of “types” of video game stories (with no examples!) do much to advance that conversation.
There’s a conversation to be had about the quality and originality of storytelling in video games and why gamers are so quick to praise mediocre narratives,
No, there’s really not. This is just a condescending way to disreguard someone else opinion on a piece of media or writing you dislike. The simple answer is just that thehly legitimately thought it was good.
I’m so tired of people acting like they’re some keepers of “good” content because they have the nonsense notion that media/writing is obectively good/bad. Want to talk about a film you just really liked online? Nope, it’s “objectively” bad writing, therefore you have terrible taste for liking it (or get called worse). I was hoping discussions like this would be better here.
This reads like dialogue written for the “pretentious writer” friend character trope who is always shitting on other peoples’ work but hasn’t ever had any success with his own in every B-list Hollywood meta comedy: smug, confident, completely wrong, and utterly without purpose or substance.
Yes, there was an odd vibe here I couldn’t pin down, I think you found it.
My favorite game’s awesome story made me feel things, and I like it for that
People who don’t like anything are incredibly boring, in my humble opinion. Imagine putting all of this effort into an essay about why other people shouldn’t like the things that they like. I think a lot of people mistake being a contrarion for being an intellectual.
I’d say this is the result of someone asking ChatGPT for “rage bait post for a video game forum” but it has too much insufferable personality to be AI generated
why i hate your beehaw post: it’s carried by episodic discussion points
I don’t need complete agency and freedom to enjoy a game. I don’t play games like Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us expecting to create my own story; I play them to be immersed in a beautifully written and preformed narrative.
#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency
It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.
Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?
I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.
Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.
Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.
I think it’s long past the time that we kill dead the notion of The Player = The Player-Character
Tell me your parents never read stories to you, without telling me your parents never read stories to you.
I was thinking first year media studies at uni.
So I have a lot of thoughts on this that I have repeatedly failed to word in a way that I am happy with, so I am going to sideline a lot of those to focus on some more high-level thoughts:
As many have noted, there would probably be significantly better discussion happening if the ideas in the post were framed in a less antagonistic way. While I don’t think the post should be removed, it has been reported multiple times as “obvious rage-bait”, and I have a hard time disagreeing with that view. It is hard to take criticisms of things you like when the tone of that criticism is condescending and antagonistic. This isn’t helped by all the “reasons” given are very subjective and vague, with no concrete examples given to give a reader any context for what you think falls in these categories. In my experience, this type of “conversation” (I hesitate to call it a “conversation” because I think the structure makes having an actual conversation nearly impossible) is really prevalent amongst men who studied STEM and Redditors. Rather than a discussion about preferences in games and strengths/weaknesses of different storytelling styles, it encourages “I’m right, you’re wrong” argumentation, which just won’t be as fruitful and serves mostly to build tension within the community. For me personally, while I do think the ideas in the post make for interesting discussions/conversations, I don’t believe it is possible when this is the initial framing. I hope we can avoid this discussion/argumentation style on beehaw.
As for a more general thoughts on the contents of the post: this feels like it could be condensed down to “I only like a very specific and limited type of storytelling and view anything outside of that as lesser and flawed.” It is also comes off as a very simplistic and “rationalist” analysis of storytelling. It is focused only on tropes and structure and ignores how those tropes might be used to emphasize a theme, or the emotional impact of those stories.
I agree with you fully! Only thing I did not really like is the part about this sort of communication being “really prevalent amongst men who studied STEM and Redditors”. I know you prefaced it with “in my experience”, but it still feels a bit generalizing and not really relevant to the rest of the post. I think the behaviour should be called out, but pinning it on a group always feels a bit “us vs them”. Feel free to reply and discuss further, unlike OP I am looking for connection and mutual understanding :)
Agreed, plus where is OP in the discussion? Sitting back with popped corn?
Whoa. It’s like I’m seeing clearly for the first time in my life. You’ve opened my eyes and I will now immediately stop enjoying things because you, for some reason, feel so weirdly insecure about your own tastes that you felt the need to write, like, 25 paragraphs (that I absolutely did not read) seeking validation from internet strangers.
Really though. What was the goal here?
your examples are so weirdly vague I think this post would get a proverbial “mega-boost” from some actual examples of video games.
And I can agree with a few of these but some of them seem so weird. Like, assuming that an episodic story automatically means each episode is self-contained with 1 major conflict is a really archaic way of thinking about episodes. In television, that all but died out in like 2002. And a fixation on things as opposed to people is actually what makes a lot of dystopic writing great. The removal of the “self,” can lead to a feeling of nihilism and can lead the viewer to appreciating how much of the world has lost its life.
Also, jokes on you, you probably don’t hate my favorite video game’s story because it actually has no story ;)
Honestly being dismissive of these concepts as trite rather than recognizing the implicit value of tropes as a means of conveyance for a good story reads as contrived criticism attempting to convey an understanding of media broadly.
Tropes don’t make a story ineffective. Simple story structure doesn’t make a story ineffective. Contrivances don’t make a story ineffective. Did a story make you feel? Did it make you think? It did it’s job. This is non-constructive at best and an active effort to not understand media at worst and I’m really not sure what you’re trying to even get across given you gave zero examples of productive, fruitful storytelling that is more worth engaging with.
