h. Play

That’s what basically stories to games are.

At the GDC 08, Ken Levine creative director on Bioshock told the audience something that would not please everyone:

“The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story”

It’s still a point that hurts a lot of people but it’s totally true, even if we see a lot of game to movie conversions. It’s not for their stupid stories, it’s for the money. Because without interaction, Doom or Dead or Alive are just awful, plain bad stories.

In Edge’s Death Of The Author article Clint Hocking sums it up pretty well when comparing storytelling in games and other medias:

“[..] I’d rather play a game and then read a book than play a game with a story that isn’t as good as a book – particularly when it’s wrecked by the difference between what I’m doing and what I’m told is actually happening. I’d rather have two distinct experiences than one that feels like a bastard child.”

Storytelling is as old as the humanity. It works well on linear medias (books movies comics, thousand years of polishing) and doesn’t with non-linear medias such as games.

So is it really important in the interactive media?

I think that it’s not. Games stories are good for one thing: setting up the world.

SW theme + live setting: massive WIN. Of course Vader is on bass.

I asked myself why Monkey Island or Grim Fandango was so much good memories despite the fact of being adventure games, heavily storytelling focused. It’s not because of their stories, it’s because of their themes and world settings. Look at the story of Monkey Island:

“The game starts off with the main character Guybrush Threepwood stating "I want to be a pirate!" To do so, he must prove himself to three old pirate captains. During the perilous pirate trials, he meets the beautiful governor Elaine Marley, with whom he falls in love, unaware that the ghost pirate LeChuck also has his eyes on her. When Elaine is kidnapped, Guybrush procures crew and ship to track LeChuck down, defeat him and rescue his love”

It’s sort of a super cheap story you encountered in other medias millions of time. This is not really what stayed in my mind after playing it. What stays is the setting of evolving between Caribbean islands day and night. What stays is the humorous overall setting. What stays is hanging around doing my thing and trying to solve puzzles in this crazy world, mix of old golden age of piracy and contemporary US culture.

Same for Grim Fandango. But crazier.

And I really feel that a lot of games with “stories” are just appealing to people the same way those two games did on me. The fantasy setting of WoW appeals to people, the social interaction appeals to people. The story comes at the end. It could almost been removed (though hardcore people read all that quests shit), it’s not crucial to the quality of the game.

The Fantasy setting is strong because it relies on the roots of storytelling:

“Fantasy games have one unique feature that has not yet been duplicated in other genres: they are approachable and easily understood by the player base. If you say a game is “fantasy,” then you know it’s going to be roughly based on medieval technology, with some magic, probably some elves, and monsters to slay. This is because fantasy games are based on legends and fables that we’ve been telling/reading to our children for hundreds of years. Fantasy stories are part of our culture, and just about everyone has been exposed to them. Because of this, fantasy games are easily understood by the player base.”

That’s why SF is a niche for nerds (don’t take it personally, I prefer science to supernatural stuff in a medieval world). That’s why Eve is Eve. I mean, empty (300,000 accounts compared to 11 millions in WoW).

The same with Final Fantasy and japanese RPGs. Stupid and boring stories, outstanding and unique world settings (character design is a big part of it) that makes you want to dig and dive into it, thanks to the complex and deep RPG game system. Story is the cherry on the cake. And most of the time it stinks.

Anyway the thing is, these world settings are terribly missing the point that we are FREE to have any world setting we want. The recent Brutal Legend is a good example.

And believe me if you haven’t read One Piece, this picture is pretty normal.

I always think about mangas and animated movies as a crazy source of world settings. They always have something particular, a twist you didn’t see anywhere. Just thinking about FLCL or Mind Game and I have sparkles in my eyes figuring out something playable in that sort of… Mmh, maybe they are too crazy.

Instead we go the safe path providing classic, over-used settings trying to be as cool as the next action movie. Is that all we can do?

I’m sure it’s not.

Go go go! will always be downsampled in my mind.

I miss playing this game. Sometimes a lot. It’s been one of the funniest game I have ever played with Bomberman and Mario Kart of course.

It’s not about killing. It’s all about situations. It’s all about player stories. Collaborative gameplay, in the best immersion setting you can have: First-Person-View.

When people say that these games are all conveying violence. Of course there are bullets, headshots, blood (I would have put less of this one in TF2) but looking at these games from that point of view is wrong because you can judge any game with moral and none are made with that in mind. Otherwise, what the hell means a plumber eating mushrooms and getting stronger with it while jumping like crazy? A subliminal go-get-some-drugs message that’s right. Or not.

At the last Indiecade there was a panel around FPV games, encouraging wacky concepts. The only concept I have for a FPV game is something like that:

AV-98 Ingram

I don’t want a human scale anymore, neither a little one. I want to be a GIANT. And not in a realistic slow painful way like MechWarrior, but in a way where I can move as fast as a human would, but in a robot of 12 meters for example.

So of course you would run in streets and manage to avoid cars, trucks and not to destroy everything in the city.

I would set a police procedural background (and other secret stuff) where you have to team with pals to arrest crazy robots like in the Patlabor serie. I loved how it describes the boredom of a little team of people sent to fix stuffs in the city. It’s really different from the simple plot of conflicts and wars you have in the Battletech world. Here, it would just be driving a robot, team up with friends and being careful to the city while wondering what the government or the army are up to.

You would be severely punished if not being careful, or rewarded if the mission was worth the damages (tough gameplay balance to set up!). You would be downgraded in the leaderboard if doing a mission would kill citizens and or making the city look like a battle field.

Of course it would be a MMO with destructable environments. Like in CS, I would emphasize action or combats on ressource scarcity, pushing people to work together. Want to capture this crazy robots? Make a plan because it’s not gonna happen by bunny jumping and railgunning the sucker.

The main problem of FPV games now is that you’re not responsible at all. They all have this “survive, whatever is happening” design. L4D makes it legitimate with zombies. TF2 makes it legitimate with a cartoon-ish style sending the message that “it’s all for fun don’t worry”.

I know, this PatlaborMMO is not very wacky, but I really have hard times to believe in really weird stuff with this immersive setup that is the FPV. Throwing kisses to others? Mmmh, no. A gun that create things? It works with 2D even in non- fast paced action game (Sprout Gun from Grim Fandango) but in FPV? Too weird..

Sometimes I really feel that we can’t go crazy producing games in some specific technical settings.

Still, we need to keep searching.

Suda51 was saying in a Gamasutra interview that his company was like a “video game band” with four members: script writing division, programming division, graphic art division and sound division”. All equal. Fab Four.

I’d like to dig that a little more.

Ok they’re only three. But you need confidence doing that don’t you?

If we look at the music history, we can see that the more people from a band know each other for a long time, the better it is for the formation to go further, to break through, to be successful whatever you put in on this last term.

What people knowing each other for a long time means? It means we’re talking about close friends or family. From the buddy in high school to the brother.

Rage Against the Machine child hood friend bassist of the vocalist. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger classmates in the early 50s. Freddie Mercury classmate with the first bassist and co-founder of Brian May’s band called Smile and renamed Queen.

Do you know a band that placed at least a single in the charts for five or more decades (50 years people!)? Besides The Rolling Stones, I know one. the band’s name is The Isley Brothers.

You get the idea.

It makes sense. I may be wrong but creating computer games and creating music are astonishly similar with this mix of absolute and total freedom when beginning to the extremely complex and subtual balance you need to achieve at the end of the production which if not obtained, can ruin everything. In graphic creation –from paint to movies- you have so much opportunities to mask hide or enhance. It’s all about illusion. Sound and games are more realistic in this creative sense.

To make it possible you have two choices: do it alone. Or do it with people you really can go with. It’s of course easier when it’s friends you know very well ie when you are all in a hard and stressful position and that you still don’t want to punch or stab them. I mean, for real :)

That’s why the indie game scene is full of little teams. That’s why AAA games get better when the core team is the same from an iteration to another. That’s why they fail when the team is not anymore (and with all the layoffs these last months, fear).

Look at the success of Zeno Clash, a game from a little team from Chile. I was really curious to see who they are because a large 3D world with a story, new gameplay and unique aesthetics is a FUCKING achievement for a team of four people. Four people, three brothers.

I’m not that surprised.

It scares me. I feel like I don’t have a band and never really did. As time passes by, it seems more and more out of touch.. I just tried to make me better at doing audio and games. I have a mental barrier for coding. But I should do it.

Then I would be like Prince.

Also if we want to mark our time with our medium, we need more friendship of xx years relying on the same visions or even family members into games in dev teams and less 3 months contracts, less ephemeral collaborations.

It is not happening at a big scale yet. The computer game creative-wise is kind of stagnating.

Maybe it’s unrelated.

The term audio-visual (AV) may refer to works with both a sound and a visual component.

It’s not too much about budgets or game developers not going for great audio and sound, they do from Indie to AAA.

It’s more about the fact that dev people usually separate these two components. Which are totally the same: they need to match perfectly and in the best case, they enhance each other. For that you need to make them work together, all the time, the sooner the better.

But in a lot of case the producer just doesn’t see it that way, graphic first, sound later.

The only thing in common that games have with movies is that they both have a sound and a visual component. In movies, it’s been a while that sound is made at the same time that the visuals or even before: the lightsaber sound –yeah I always use the same example because it just works- has been made with notes, the script of the movie and roughs of the ultimate Jedi weapon. Not after shooting, not during, not on post-production, BEFORE all of that. Pretty sure it gave George Lucas some visual ideas.

See what I mean?

These movies from the 70s indies directors –Scorsese, de Palma, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg- all share that: sound and visual are matching like crazy. Or not matching but playing together. I watched E.T. recently and the sound of men’s keys in the wood is brilliant, conveying this awful feeling of being locked or trapped. The high-pitched keys sound suggests oppression, jail. And there’s so much more interaction between audio and visual in this movie (and all the work of these directors).

Think about it. Emphasis on the sound part more than on the visual part of keys. Why? Because keys are not sexy and a close-up of them would be ridiculous. Pushy even.

That’s exactly what we do in games. We put too much effort on the visual to the point where it becomes ridiculous in a lot of ways: 3D graphic team sizes, outstanding visuals with generic audio (SF IV with sounds from sound banks everyone can buy), visual effects pornography (blur that shit, make the GPU sweat with useless particles just “because we can”) etc..

Everything is visual and if it’s the case, it doesn’t appeal the same way that if it’s audiovisual. More than trying to tell stories, it’s this delicate recipe of mixing two powerful components that we should go for in the game industry when we are looking at movies or tv.

Sound is easily forgettable –I didn’t remember the keys sound but watching it reminded me about it a lot- though. In the game industry we do think in months. A triple A game is making all its money in a matter of weeks. We globally don’t think our games as timeless creations.

Those who do that, success: Valve, Grim Fandango’s music and visual style, Everyday Shooter.. Damn, this game make me have tears sometimes. It’s a friggin’ shooter but the interaction and perfect match on the audiovisual part goes in places in my mind, in my heart that a little few games did go. It’s just overall a so much better experience, dare I say an unforgettable one.

We are building experiences. And we all have ears. Think about it when building the A/V content  around your gameplay.