No Time To Play

So, the project that has kept me busy as of late has ended, poorly (making current again something I wrote over a year ago). But all my recent reading triggered something in me, and instead of going back to coding games, I started writing fiction again for the first time in years. And this time, it seems I’m onto something.

As an amusing coincidence, the issue of storytelling in games has recently resurfaced. You may have noticed Kelketek’s earlier post, but the Rampant Coyote also chimed in, even twice, not to mention this post on how improvisational theater can inform game stories. And it just happens that storytelling is the one other skill (beyond coding and art) I need in order to make serious games.

But first to get something done.

While there is a continuing trend to market games to a larger audience by basing them primarily on gameplay that is quickly learned and satisfying, there remains something to be said for interesting storylines in interactive media. How a storyline is presented, however, is as important as the story itself. Bad cut scenes that keep a player from playing the game might as well be loading screens.

There has been a tendency, historically, for games to try to emulate movies in the story telling department. Games will pause, a short video advancing the story will be played, and then the gameplay continues. There are a number of problems this creates in a gaming medium.
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What is it with people waking up in 2011 to declare they know what CRPGs (computer role-playing games for the acronym challenged) are, better than anyone else? It’s doubly annoying, as the genre is rich and diverse on the one hand, and solidly anchored in a tradition of pen&paper games on the other hand.

The latest to try and squeeze countless games into a narrow definition (and complain about it) is this write-up from an online magazine I hadn’t heard about before. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, that’s okay, because the tl;dr version is right there at the beginning.

None of these games (ed: DA, Fable, Final Fantasy) are role-playing games. They are, in fact, nothing more than story-driven strategy games.

At that point, I almost stopped reading, because the author is criticizing a bunch of very different CRPG franchises for… capturing the essence of Dungeons and Dragons itself.

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Let me tell you about the man named Chris Crawford. A legendary game designer, he created several landmark war- and strategy games, and most importantly wrote a good deal about it. His 1984 book The Art of Computer Game Design (available for free online) is pretty much required reading in this business. For at least 15 years, he’s been working on a system for interactive storytelling called Storytron — formerly Erasmatron — which he hopes will revolutionize gaming.

After reading my recent article about games and stories, a friend pointed out that my ideas sound a lot like the concept that underlies Storytron. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my point at all, and whether the misunderstanding was my fault or his, a clarification can only help.

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So, I spent much of last week preparing and then running an RPG session. Normally, I suck at making up stories (believe me, I tried for years). But as a game master, I’m actually adequate, or so my players tell me. Which used to puzzle me: if static, linear storytelling is hard, interactive storytelling should be much harder, right?

It took me a long time to understand that it’s the other way around. With the imagination of other people helping you, it should be much easier (for reasons I will explain in a moment). But this conclusion raises another question: if that’s the case, why do videogames, as a rule, have such sucky stories that some people question whether they should try for stories at all?

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