The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Replayable Narratives: You Probably Don't Even Play Games Once
TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
So check this out. It's nothing surprising or amazing if you've paid attention to, for instance, Steam achievements, but it's timely because Ken Levine just committed studio seppuku so he can make video games that you can play three times without getting bored. People barely even play through a game once, and Levine (who is far from alone) wants the game to hold up on repeat playthroughs.
But is this a goal that game developers should have? We can divide the issue into two questions. First, should a narrative be something such that you can experience it multiple times? I think the answer here is obviously yes: books and movies can be good no matter how many times you read and watch them, and there's no reason games can't be like this. But... games are so long, most of the time. We're not just talking about Gunpoint, which has a fun little story you can experience again when you replay the game later. We're also talking about BioShock Infinite (which is on the short end of these sorts of things), which takes you hours and hours to get through every time you play it. If 2001: A Space Odyssey were 9 hours long, would anyone want to rewatch it? Or even want to finish it? Because it seems like not everyone wants to finish games like The Walking Dead.
The second question is whether the narrative should change when you go through it multiple times. By their very nature, most games have a narrative that varies at least a bit. Even a straightforwardly linear game like Infinite has stuff you won't see if you don't look around, diaries that you might not find, lines that Elizabeth might not say if you don't rodeo her near the specific item, etc. This looks like an even sketchier idea in a world where lots of people don't even beat your game once. Alpha Protocol got slammed in reviews by people who would probably have been blown away if they played it four more times. Are these reviewers just idiots (idiots like the rest of us)? Or is this Alpha Protocol's fault for having a stupid goal in the first place? Who cares if your game is different the third time through if nobody makes it through the first time?
I think this tweet sums up one view pretty well:
What we want are choices that matter, right? So when someone say "you can replay my game three times," this means our choices matter in one of three ways, because they had one of three results on the story. So is this the value of things like branching narratives? They imbue choices with meaning?
That tweet is just a tweet, so it can't be very detailed, but I think saying "non-canned" is not the best way of putting it. Sometimes choices with "canned" results can be really interesting. The Walking Dead understands this, I think - people give it shit about how if you replay the game, it turns out a lot of the choices you make just bring you back to the same location, but that's beside the point. What matters is what set of choices you make, not whether someone making different choices sees something different. In the context of The Walking Dead, those choices matter a lot to the narrative, and although if you look at them from outside the context of the narrative, it seems less impressive, that's not really important.
On the other hand, though, Alpha Protocol is such an amazing game because choice is everything in that game. You can play it five times and get a completely different narrative all five times. This isn't just a choose your own adventure game, it's a fundamentally different way of making a game.
But this brings us back to the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of people never see this stuff. One thing you might say is "fuck those people." Books aren't written for people who stop reading halfway through, movies aren't shot for people who turn them off or leave the theater, and games aren't made for people who play halfway through Portal and say to themselves "welp, I guess it's just test chambers forever, might as well peace out." Game narratives should be about what they can be, not what people tend to experience when they play them.
On the other hand, I think there are good reasons people don't beat games. Games take a long fucking time. Portal, a short game, is longer than every movie except, say, Sátántangó. Alpha Protocol, a fairly short game, is still five to eight hours per playthrough. BioShock Infinite takes longer, Deus Ex takes longer, and holy fuck can you imagine playing through Dragon Age enough times to see all the differences between the various origins? Don't game developers need to get over themselves and realize that getting someone to play a game once through is a coup, let alone getting them to play it multiple times, and the effort should be put into something like what The Walking Dead does, which is making the main narrative compelling even if the branching is limited, rather than adding a lot of branches that people are never going to see?
My personal opinion is that it's a mistake to divorce the narrative from the systems. (Levine fucked up Infinite by doing this, I think, so I'll be interested in seeing if he fucks up his next game.) When I think of games I want to replay, I don't think of Dragon Age or The Walking Dead. Dragon Age is a slog and The Walking Dead is a story that happens, once, and I'm not interested in seeing it again, especially because I'd have to sit through the game again. Games I want to replay are Deus Ex and Pac-Man. Why these games? Because they're fun! And in replaying Deus Ex because it's fun, you discover all sorts of interesting narrative branching that you don't find in Pac-Man. That's okay for Pac-Man, of course, but it's also great for Deus Ex. What we need are games that are fun to play through multiple times, because these are the games that can support the weight of divergent narratives being bolted on to them.
But in some sense this is a very unsatisfying solution. Games with the complexity of Deus Ex can handle branching narratives, but only to a degree. It takes a more locked down game like Alpha Protocol to branch for real. Maybe the solution is to make something as fun as Deus Ex with the narrative of Alpha Protocol. That would be hard. But perhaps it's the holy grail of replayable game narratives.
Maybe JP LeBreton (the author the tweet above) is right. Maybe replayability has nothing to do with it. I've admitted as much when it comes to The Walking Dead - can I admit as much when it comes to a game that branches much more? Can I leave those branches unexplored and be happy with the choices presented to me in the narrative because I could have done otherwise? I don't know. That to me sounds like playing through Alpha Protocol once. The more a narrative varies based on what you do, the less impressive it is on a single playthrough.
Another solution is just to make games shorter. I mean, Jesus Christ. Does every game have to be 8+ hours? This is why I love Twine games. You can branch the fuck out of your Twine game and I don't mind, I can play it again to see the other branch. I wish that were the future of games. If I want to play a game for 80+ hours I'll play Titanfall or BF4. If you're trying to tell me a story there's no excuse to take 8+ hours to do that shit. Figure out what's good about your game and pack it into a few hours.
Will this work? I can picture AAA studio heads vomiting explosively at the thought of sinking millions of dollars into a two and a half hour game. BioShock Infinite would've benefited from being one quarter the length, but that wouldn't have cut its budget by one quarter. Can games with production values far in excess of Twine games ever cut their play time down to something reasonable?
I think so. Gaming culture right now thinks short games are the worst thing in the world, and there's not enough of a market to make them sustainable, but I think this can change. You can dump millions of dollars into an effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster and nobody complains when it's only an hour and a half. (People get antsy if it's too long!) Games can be like this. It'll take a change in gaming culture - games will have to stop being made for teenage boys with too much time on their hands - but we're already fucking there! Remember? This post started with an examination of how lots of people don't finish these fucking games already. Game developers need to catch up to this. Once they stop making 8+ hour games for people who stop playing after 4+ hours, that's when we're going to see some seriously good stuff. And that's also when gaming is going to get even more popular. Because right now, one of the biggest barriers to entry for gaming is how if I want to show someone a masterpiece like, say, Deus Ex, they need 20 to 40 hours to sink into that. And that's fucking nuts. Nobody who isn't already a gamer wants to do that. So I show them Twine games instead. There's nothing wrong with that, but I yearn for a future where I can show people narrative games with all the shiny graphics of BioShock Infinite without knowing they're never going to slog through the couple of hours it takes to even meet Elizabeth, let alone the 8+ it takes to make it to the end. Ain't nobody got time for that.
But is this a goal that game developers should have? We can divide the issue into two questions. First, should a narrative be something such that you can experience it multiple times? I think the answer here is obviously yes: books and movies can be good no matter how many times you read and watch them, and there's no reason games can't be like this. But... games are so long, most of the time. We're not just talking about Gunpoint, which has a fun little story you can experience again when you replay the game later. We're also talking about BioShock Infinite (which is on the short end of these sorts of things), which takes you hours and hours to get through every time you play it. If 2001: A Space Odyssey were 9 hours long, would anyone want to rewatch it? Or even want to finish it? Because it seems like not everyone wants to finish games like The Walking Dead.
The second question is whether the narrative should change when you go through it multiple times. By their very nature, most games have a narrative that varies at least a bit. Even a straightforwardly linear game like Infinite has stuff you won't see if you don't look around, diaries that you might not find, lines that Elizabeth might not say if you don't rodeo her near the specific item, etc. This looks like an even sketchier idea in a world where lots of people don't even beat your game once. Alpha Protocol got slammed in reviews by people who would probably have been blown away if they played it four more times. Are these reviewers just idiots (idiots like the rest of us)? Or is this Alpha Protocol's fault for having a stupid goal in the first place? Who cares if your game is different the third time through if nobody makes it through the first time?
I think this tweet sums up one view pretty well:
What we want are choices that matter, right? So when someone say "you can replay my game three times," this means our choices matter in one of three ways, because they had one of three results on the story. So is this the value of things like branching narratives? They imbue choices with meaning?
That tweet is just a tweet, so it can't be very detailed, but I think saying "non-canned" is not the best way of putting it. Sometimes choices with "canned" results can be really interesting. The Walking Dead understands this, I think - people give it shit about how if you replay the game, it turns out a lot of the choices you make just bring you back to the same location, but that's beside the point. What matters is what set of choices you make, not whether someone making different choices sees something different. In the context of The Walking Dead, those choices matter a lot to the narrative, and although if you look at them from outside the context of the narrative, it seems less impressive, that's not really important.
On the other hand, though, Alpha Protocol is such an amazing game because choice is everything in that game. You can play it five times and get a completely different narrative all five times. This isn't just a choose your own adventure game, it's a fundamentally different way of making a game.
But this brings us back to the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of people never see this stuff. One thing you might say is "fuck those people." Books aren't written for people who stop reading halfway through, movies aren't shot for people who turn them off or leave the theater, and games aren't made for people who play halfway through Portal and say to themselves "welp, I guess it's just test chambers forever, might as well peace out." Game narratives should be about what they can be, not what people tend to experience when they play them.
On the other hand, I think there are good reasons people don't beat games. Games take a long fucking time. Portal, a short game, is longer than every movie except, say, Sátántangó. Alpha Protocol, a fairly short game, is still five to eight hours per playthrough. BioShock Infinite takes longer, Deus Ex takes longer, and holy fuck can you imagine playing through Dragon Age enough times to see all the differences between the various origins? Don't game developers need to get over themselves and realize that getting someone to play a game once through is a coup, let alone getting them to play it multiple times, and the effort should be put into something like what The Walking Dead does, which is making the main narrative compelling even if the branching is limited, rather than adding a lot of branches that people are never going to see?
My personal opinion is that it's a mistake to divorce the narrative from the systems. (Levine fucked up Infinite by doing this, I think, so I'll be interested in seeing if he fucks up his next game.) When I think of games I want to replay, I don't think of Dragon Age or The Walking Dead. Dragon Age is a slog and The Walking Dead is a story that happens, once, and I'm not interested in seeing it again, especially because I'd have to sit through the game again. Games I want to replay are Deus Ex and Pac-Man. Why these games? Because they're fun! And in replaying Deus Ex because it's fun, you discover all sorts of interesting narrative branching that you don't find in Pac-Man. That's okay for Pac-Man, of course, but it's also great for Deus Ex. What we need are games that are fun to play through multiple times, because these are the games that can support the weight of divergent narratives being bolted on to them.
But in some sense this is a very unsatisfying solution. Games with the complexity of Deus Ex can handle branching narratives, but only to a degree. It takes a more locked down game like Alpha Protocol to branch for real. Maybe the solution is to make something as fun as Deus Ex with the narrative of Alpha Protocol. That would be hard. But perhaps it's the holy grail of replayable game narratives.
Maybe JP LeBreton (the author the tweet above) is right. Maybe replayability has nothing to do with it. I've admitted as much when it comes to The Walking Dead - can I admit as much when it comes to a game that branches much more? Can I leave those branches unexplored and be happy with the choices presented to me in the narrative because I could have done otherwise? I don't know. That to me sounds like playing through Alpha Protocol once. The more a narrative varies based on what you do, the less impressive it is on a single playthrough.
Another solution is just to make games shorter. I mean, Jesus Christ. Does every game have to be 8+ hours? This is why I love Twine games. You can branch the fuck out of your Twine game and I don't mind, I can play it again to see the other branch. I wish that were the future of games. If I want to play a game for 80+ hours I'll play Titanfall or BF4. If you're trying to tell me a story there's no excuse to take 8+ hours to do that shit. Figure out what's good about your game and pack it into a few hours.
Will this work? I can picture AAA studio heads vomiting explosively at the thought of sinking millions of dollars into a two and a half hour game. BioShock Infinite would've benefited from being one quarter the length, but that wouldn't have cut its budget by one quarter. Can games with production values far in excess of Twine games ever cut their play time down to something reasonable?
I think so. Gaming culture right now thinks short games are the worst thing in the world, and there's not enough of a market to make them sustainable, but I think this can change. You can dump millions of dollars into an effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster and nobody complains when it's only an hour and a half. (People get antsy if it's too long!) Games can be like this. It'll take a change in gaming culture - games will have to stop being made for teenage boys with too much time on their hands - but we're already fucking there! Remember? This post started with an examination of how lots of people don't finish these fucking games already. Game developers need to catch up to this. Once they stop making 8+ hour games for people who stop playing after 4+ hours, that's when we're going to see some seriously good stuff. And that's also when gaming is going to get even more popular. Because right now, one of the biggest barriers to entry for gaming is how if I want to show someone a masterpiece like, say, Deus Ex, they need 20 to 40 hours to sink into that. And that's fucking nuts. Nobody who isn't already a gamer wants to do that. So I show them Twine games instead. There's nothing wrong with that, but I yearn for a future where I can show people narrative games with all the shiny graphics of BioShock Infinite without knowing they're never going to slog through the couple of hours it takes to even meet Elizabeth, let alone the 8+ it takes to make it to the end. Ain't nobody got time for that.
0
Posts
I'd argue a big part of Mass Effect's success is the ability to get to make big RPG style story choices in a game that you can finish in under ten hours if you stick to the main story rather than the fourty odd most RPG's take.
(Also the average completion time is 33 hours for ME2 which suggests you might be off in terms of how long a person generally takes to beat it - if a game can be beaten in 10 hours that hardly matters if the average person takes three times as long.)
It's like the difference between, say, watching the entirety of Farscape and watching Pacific Rim. There are things that happen in Farscape that are pretty heavy because you actually get time to get involved with the characters and the setting, and then stuff that happens in Pacific Rim where people die makes you go "okay" because you hardly know the characters. Yeah, Pacific Rim isn't the deepest movie ever, but the difference there is the time the stories have to work with; if we'd had four years of a Pacific Rim TV show that culminated with a a 2.5-hour epic clash, the characters lost there would've had far more impact.
If I'm playing a game for a story, I don't want the equivalent of movie one-off which barely has time to fit the story in with actually playing the game. I paid something like twenty bucks for Bioshock Infinite, and if that had run 2.5 hours, I damned well would've felt ripped off because that's just too short. You can't fit enough stuff in that time period to have both a great game and a great story. That's not to say the pacing wasn't bad, but that's not due to the game length. As it stood, the "wonder" of the city was almost entirely lost on me because, aside from how pretty everything looked, none of that "wonder" came through exploration because I was being led by the nose down a linear series of stages due to the devs being so intent on me, as the players, having the "right" experience.
Something like Alpha Protocol suffered because, aside from the flexible story and characters, pretty much the whole rest of the game sucked. The gameplay was so bad that people thought a lot of how it was built to work was buggy, everything was winnable with pistol spam, it was clumsy, animations were awkward, and yada yada yada. I love the thing and I still have a really hard time playing it, because the parts without character interactions are pretty sucky. That's not a game length issue, it's a game design issue.
I would definitely say that game stories need to be better, not shorter. I haven't been a teenager for a loooong time, and I still hate that so very, very many games stuff me in a box from the word "go"; cut that playtime down to movie length, and I'll be stuck trying to find my way out of a mailing envelope instead. If I want to watch a movie, I'll go watch a movie, but I play games specifically because of deeper, move involved experiences. Simply chopping game lengths down in general wouldn't make anything better, just shorter and less involved.
And?
Like I don't get the point of your op. I mean there are points in there I agree with and some I disagree with but I don't really get the whole thing. (I agree with what you said about systems for example.)
But, why should anyone care how many players have finished ME2 or who has time anymore or whateverthefuck? The info you get out of that is questionable at best and I don't think helps the point,
People don't even finish games that are super short. Heck as of right now there's a whole 20% of Payday 2 owners who have never played the game judging by the fact that only 80% have the achievement for putting on the mask.
Honestly if you look at achievement stats for anything the end result is going to be 'why bother doing anything ever' because you'll be shocked how little players do. Mass Effect has a massive strength that I wish more games went for where it, to a degree, is exactly as long as the player wants it to be. You can finish it in ten hours or you can be a perfectionist and take fifty and both are perfectly valid and scale naturally.
I think the idea of replayable narratives is a bold one and if it does mean shorter but more replayable games I'm completely down for that as a concept. Though really I've never being narrative focused so how much I'd enjoy it would probably be down to what actually changed gameplay wise between playthroughs rather than whether the story played out in different ways.
Let Navarre kill Lebedev, leave
Let Navarre kill Lebedev, kill her after
Kill Navarre before she kills Lebdev, leave
Kill Navarree, then also kill Lebedev
It only really changed a bit of dialogue, but just that the option was there, and wasn't presented to you. Navarre even highlights as green-friendly under the crosshairs the entire time.
What if they remade Deus Ex, and you could kill Navarre, and take Lebedev and Paul and fight your way out of the airport to go do NSF stuff together, in an entirely different set of missions?
1. No real motivation. Sorry
2. Yes. It's also a stupid conclusion to draw (And has been in the past sadly by devs and pub.) because the only thing it says is that 40% finished the game. No reason given for the why. And yes, the *why* is very important. Who says you HAVE to finish a game? Did the player enjoy the game more because he finished it? And thats just one line of thinking that isn't represented AT ALL in that number. What good does it do for the people who wouldn't have finished the game anyway and just wanted a bit of fun, maybe due to the mechanics, then?
3. Using Alpha Protocol here as an example is..... not optimal. In the end its reactivity probably didn't make the biggest part of its budget. There's probably better ones out there.
This goes back to the LeBreton tweet. If Bioware's primary objective in designing Mass Effect was to make the game replayable, I would say that they failed quite badly. I'm catastrophically unlikely to play Mass Effect more than once. But the fact that those narrative choices exist made the game a lot more interesting for me even just the first time through.
In this respect, it doesn't necessarily matter if the choices are "canned" or not, as long as I find the setting and the story interesting. In Knights of the Old Republic, being offered five different conversation options where the protagonist demonstrates five different personality trends makes me a lot more interested in the game even if I know for a fact that the conversation is always going to end in the same basic place. When I pick something on Mass Effect's conversation wheel and Shepard says or does something radically different from what I intended, it completely shatters my immersion and adversely affects my enjoyment even if I know for a fact that the game is going to forget about this conversation the instant I leave the room. If I'm invested in the setting or the story, I'm willing to play along in situations like these even if the actual payoff of those decisions is kind of low.
If a designer's goal really is primarily to make a game replayable, then how "canned" the choices feel start to matter a lot more. For one thing, once you start actually seeing what does and, more importantly, does not change as a result of your actions, it tends to put a lot of stress on the suspension of disbelief you allowed yourself on the first playthrough. I deliberated quite a lot on the Council decision at the end of Mass Effect, for a number of reasons that all naturally flowed out from other things that had happened during the game (it's great when that happens...I actually rather liked the much-maligned ending of Fallout 3 because, by sheer coincidence, it created a really interesting little narrative when taken in the context of the last two or three quests I had done). But now that I know how far out of its way Mass Effect 2 goes to brush that decision under the rug and minimize the effect it has on the plot as much as possible, it makes everything a lot less interesting in retrospect.
But the most important thing is that the narrative and the gameplay are usually not affected by one another enough. The biggest reason why I'll probably never replay Mass Effect is because even if I made the exact opposite decision at every possible opportunity, the game would be 95% identical. I would go to exactly the same places and shoot exactly the same people. I would even be having exactly the same conversations; they'd just end differently. Seeing as how shooting people wasn't even my favorite thing about my first run through the game, a second playthrough isn't exactly appealing.
To convince a non-trivial number of players to replay a narrative-driven game, you have to make a large amount of the gameplay content change meaningfully between playthroughs. "You'll get to go to lots of new places and see lots of new things" is a much bigger draw than "these X cutscenes will be different". But then you get into the question of whether it's practical to spend a budget and dev time on that sort of game structure, and that takes us back to where we are now. Based on his recent work, I am highly dubious that Ken Levine is going to be the one to crack the code, but he had the good sense to move towards a smaller team and a smaller budget, so that's a start.
The games that I find the most replayable and sink the most hours into are not story driven. They tend to have some other focus, whether it is multiplayer, loot collection, high score chasing, etc. Looking at my most played games on Steam consists of Team Fortress 2, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, Borderlands 2, Borderlands, Warframe, Dungeon Defenders, and Defense Grid making up the only ones with 50+ hours accumulated, with the recently released Loadout coming in right behind them at 32 hours right alongside Mass Effect 2 at 32 hours, which was a single playthrough.
I would be all for story-driven games being shorter. You can actually cram more player choice and branching into a 3 hour experience than you can into a 30 hour experience, and given enough diversity in plot turns and potential endings, who cares if you reach 'the end' in 3 hours if you get a nearly completely different experience the next time you play it? If a game is short enough that people will be willing to replay it for a new experience the developers would feel less restricted to make sure every player goes to X location in every playthrough because they spent hundreds of hours designing it and it HAS to be part of the narrative no matter how it branches. That just starts feeling too samey and is a large part of why I never bothered replaying KOTOR or Mass Effect as the differences in the story don't make for any differences at all in the gameplay.
This right here is a big deal, too. I definitely don't want to have to replay 60+ hours of ME 1 and 2 to see branching choices that finally manifest in ME3, especially when ME1 has aged horribly.
Why would they have to? You don't need the narrative reactivity of AP to make a game with a better narrative for replayability.
Say you have three separate, shorter campaigns - i.e. you have a generalized campaign for 4-5 hours, then it branches into three splits that each have maybe 3 hours of content at the end of them.
The engine and animations are reusable among all three
The majority of the art assets could be reusable among all three
Or, if you're dreaming blue sky, you have a second full campaign tacked onto each of the three branches. As long as we're just discussing what would make for a better game as far as designing the next generation of AAA titles with replayability in mind, you shouldn't go "oh, but economics!" (1) because we're brainstorming, and (2) I don't think it would take all that much more financially as you'd think.
Do more/better writing, cut out filler, have each of the three campaigns be setpieces. Sticking with the Deus Ex analogy - No more Vandenburg Air Force Base. All Paris (Cathedral and Streets, not catacombs), all the time.
EDIT: Do the inverse of AP, I suppose. Instead of a locked down path with infinite branching narratives, have a locked down narrative but separate paths.
A lot of interesting points, but I disagree with some of your assumptions.
First, you've compared movies to mainstream narrative video games in terms of narrative length but ignored the disparity in cost. I'd hesitate to agree that "gaming culture" (whatever that's defined as) thinks short games are the worst thing in the world without the additional caveat of "...when they're sold for $50-$60". I'm pretty sure that any well-reviewed game that's derided as "too short" when it's sold for $50 will sell like hotcakes a year or so later when it can be bought for $15 or less. There are a whole bunch of economic reasons why the huge-budget, 2 hour model can work for movies that don't currently translate to the video game industry as well.
I'd also hesitate to say that the majority of "gamers" are averse to short games in general. The lingering influence of the 80+ hour JRPG being the ideal for game length is fading as the gaming demographic gets broader and, specifically, older. Look at the popularity of mobile gaming, where most of the popular games are arcade-style games you can play in random chunks of time to fit your schedule.
I'm also not really sure that adults lack the patience to experience long-form narratives, especially since a whole fuckton of TV drama series are presenting narratives that are as long, if not longer, than all but the most bloated video game. Why do adults not have the time for BioShock Infinite while they have time to watch multiple seasons of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and House of Cards? Based on that acceptance of long-form narrative in other formats, why will compressing the narratives of video games into 2-3 hour chunks (presumably by hacking out most of the non-narrative shooty or jumpy bits) make them more commercially popular?
You also seem to be presuming that a high-budget narrative game that panders to the forms of interactivity that you value (Twine/CYOA/Alpha Protocol-style narrative branching) and edits out the forms of interactivity you don't value (at least not in narrative games) will be more commercially successful, rather than just something you'd enjoy more. Why are all the shooty bits in BioShock Infinite a commercial and artistic drawback as opposed to all the shooty bits in Call Of Duty: Ghosts or Battlefield 4? The idea that scaling back the non-narrative action parts of games like BioShock Infinite or Mass Effect 2 would make players more, rather than less, likely to continue playing is an assumption I'm not sure I agree with.
That said, I think there's a larger argument to be made for publishers and developers to look into mid-range, smaller-scale, or episodic narrative games.
Also a comparison to movies and books is pointless in my opinion. Games have an entire axis of user experiences in the form of the gameplay which is not possible to replicate in either of those mediums. Perhaps instead of a focus on narrative versus gameplay, developers should instead look more toward gameplay as an aspect of the narrative and vice versa.
PSN:Furlion
Bioshock Infinite is a game about Columbia wherein the player shoots a lot of people. The markets of "interested in Columbia" and "likes to shoot people" are not inherently aligned at all.
Regardless of whether a narrative-focused Bioshock Infinite would be better or worse, or sell better or worse, it's pretty clear that it exists in a much more tenuous state than Call of Duty.
-QTE/dialog choices aren't really gameplay if that's all there is, and yes, that's entirely my point. QTE can be a gameplay thing, but unless it's part of a fully-realized gameplay engine, then it's one hell of a shallow gameplay experience. If that's all a game is, then I am not happy, because the whole thing may just as well be a movie. The story may still be just fine, but I don't want games to movies, I want them to be games; stories are only half of that equation. The story choices of AP are great, but stuff you do in the game also heavily influences those story choices, such as digging up intel, playing certain ways, etc. The game isn't just dialog choices, it's a whole interactive experience driven by how you want to play as a spy. Emphasis on "play", not "watch played out".
-Off the top of my head, I can think of: Firefly, Farscape, Babylon 5, and Deep Space 9. There are several other shows I've seen the whole way through more than once that I can't remember, because I would much, much, much rather rewatch something good or great than trudge through something awful once, which is most TV.
-The problem with saying you can't couple money value to a game only works if all games cost nothing. I paid 20 bucks for Kerbal Space Program and have dozens and dozens of hours into that, with several experiences of personal triumph involving big, complex, multi-hour rocket trips; there is no game narrative, but there has been some awesome personal narrative from what I've tried to do. If Bioshock Infinite had only been 20 bucks and 2.5 hours, there is still a slew of other games out there I could've gotten for the same price or less that would've offered deeper gameplay and/or more involved stories, and just because something is unique doesn't mean it's worth it over something else. I would not have paid 20 bucks for a Bioshock Infinite essentially devoid of gameplay, because that would've been a ripoff in terms of being a game.
-The fact that the devs felt I needed to be led anywhere in Infinite is the fault of the devs making poor choices, not games in general. System Shock 2 took an approach of "let's build this place, write a story, and throw the player at it to figure things out", and is one of the best game experiences out there. Bioshock had a similar approach, albeit with far smaller areas due to hardware limitations, but you could still skip a large amount of the game by simply going from Point A to Point B. The most "exploration" I got in Infinite was on a single stage where you could take a single different large path to find some stuff; the rest of it was locked doors along your path, or a room or two down some stairs off your main route. The devs decided The Story was the most important thing in the game and that you couldn't afford to miss an instant of it, so you get railroaded down a one-way street for the majority of the game. It didn't make the story better, it just made the game feel more forced and the experience less natural. I think it's hilarious that Levine is going off on this "replayability" tangent, after helping to make Infinite where I've played the game once and now I'm... done. There's no hidden depths to the story beyond what I was shown, no meaningful alternate approaches to the game, nothing.
-AP likely could have succeeded as a something like a Telltale-style game, sure, but all that "shit" was, again, due to crappy game design/execution. Even as bad as it was, building your spy as you wanted him was half the experience; the fact that the gameplay side of the game was an issue on the development side of things, not because they were trying to make a game with a good story. If Obsidian had made good gameplay with the story system they had, it would've been a legendary experience remembered as fondly as the likes of Deus Ex. I love Obsidian, but man, they really really screwed the pooch with that awful gameplay.
-This last bit gets subjective. I can go back as far as FF6 and say it has a much deeper, better experience than the vast majority of AAA games, simply because you actually get the time to soak up the stuff in the world and the game events. Similar thing up to FF9, then in FF10, the bottom drops out of the FF experience because voice acting and shiny graphics get prioritized, so stories and atmosphere get put way on the back burner. I enjoyed the hell out of the original Xenogears because it had shitloads of story and player time. KOTOR1 and KOTOR2 both are long and involved, with a lot of stuff to miss. The STALKER games have the intense atmosphere as the experience, and all three run a considerable length of time.
I think the biggest point of contention I have with what you're saying is that "AAA" has to mean "awesome graphics and voice acting". Why in the world is that the norm? That approach is killing AAA gaming, because what it takes to hit the max of "pretty graphics" and "voice acting" involves enormous costs. Ridiculous costs. And the experiences aren't necessarily that much better, for the vast majority of games. In the AAA budget range, without going onto the insane end of the spectrum, we could definitely have extended, involved gameplay experiences, if publishers would get the stick out of their ass and realize the really really legendary games are not the ones with short, heavily-directed campaigns that leave nothing to chance as far as the player goes, but rather the ones that draw the player in for a long time and get them involved in things, rather than just throwing high-priced spectacle at them.
BioShock Infinite, which like Call Of Duty: Ghosts is part of a franchise of first-person shooter games, was very much marketed towards players who like to shoot people:
Another example is Crusader Kings II, which doesn't directly have it's own narrative but the gameplay experiences in it generate some awesome player stories and many people sink hundreds of hours into it.
I'd argue that the impact of the main plot twists of BioShock and BioShock Infinite are magnified enormously by the first-person perspective the player experiences the game through.
Sure, you could make games set in Rapture and/or Columbia that aren't first person shooters. You can also make military-themed games that aren't first person shooters, too.
I'm perfectly fine* with someone saying "I wish BioShock Infinite was more about exploration than about shooting".
I am less convinced by the claim that, unlike other first-person shooters that are not considered as "important", that BioShock Infinite would have been artistically and commercially improved by editing down all the shooty bits and focusing instead on exploring.
*(With the caveat that "I wish I could leisurely and non-violently explore and enjoy this racist wonderland rather than being pressured to burn the motherfucking place down" might be an attitude worth discussing).
Edit: Just thought of a counter-example to the claim that narrative games would inherently be improved by cutting out the non-narrative gameplay parts and instead focusing on the main narrative: Assassin's Creed IV.
I could not give less of a fuck about the woo-woo space aliens conspiracy gibberish main plot of that game, but enjoyed the hell out of being able to resolutely ignore it almost completely and just sail the seas exploring, singing sea shanties, and doing all varieties of piratey things, 95% of which didn't advance the main narrative.
It's an action scene, to be sure, but it's all about showcasing the environment. What's with the city in the clouds? Why are there rails anywhere? Why is this girl being lynched by that priest? What's the deal with these weird cyborg guys? Look how pretty this place is!
Here's the trailer for Call of Duty: Ghosts
Granted, they went in more of a "military hardware exploding" direction as opposed to straight-up "bullets fired", but I think my point stands. The Bioshock Infinite trailer is a snippet of the crazy environment you'll be exploring, and the Call of Duty trailer is a checklist of "things that explode during the course of this game."
If you told the director of the CoD trailer that the B:I trailer had a zeppelin in it that doesn't even blow up, I get the impression that he'd laugh in your face.
Here's the thing: the narrative is not the focus of most games. It is there to frame the primary mechanics, which it usually has nothing to do with. Games are not long because the developers believe they need that long to tell their story, but because they wish to provide that much content featuring the primary mechanic. The narrative, like music, is usually only there to enhance the mood.
I am all for making short games where the narrative is the focus and I agree the industry is sorely lacking in these, but shortening games where the core mechanic does not concerns the narrative in order to try to improve them on that front is futile. The narrative will be filed down along with everything else because it is purely auxiliary. There is place for both long games which use the narrative in a supplementary fashion and short games which give it the spotlight.
My problem is I am a fickle gamer and my love for a developer will wilt, formerly I preordered games by Bioware, Gearbox, and Verant/SOE now I avoid them like the plague. So even if a developer made a game or 3 with added value content and then stopped their 'fans' would turn on them, so you are locking into doing magnitudes of order more work for the eventual venom of your consumer.
I think there are a lot of games that could profit greatly from adding content for a specific hero (d3,bl2, and the aforementioned dark souls, among others), but it smacks in the face of the direction gaming is going. Beyond a niche audience of masochists, the number of people who want to replay a game several times. As opposed to TES or Fallout which gives you the option of doing pretty much everything regardless in one play through.
So at least from a target demographic aspect, does adding this additional content to games draw in a larger segment of the market, or just make the people who were already going to buy the game enjoy it that much more?
Back in the day EA's slogan was by gamers, for gamers. It really showed in a lot of the titles they produced, however the company frequently faced financial woes, and only after they became the stuff of internet memes did they become the fiscal powerhouse they are today. Alternatively look at George Broussard and Duke Nukem, gamers left to their own devices and wanting perfection can also go horribly wrong.
Obviously their is a balance to be struck between those two examples (something akin to valve) and I am taking liberties between EA the developer and EA the publisher, but the lines between the two get blurry as the money rolls in.
I wish the group that was irrational the best, but they would be better served creating a workable modding tools for your game rather than generating content that a limited number of users will see.
Take planescape. You are given a choice of good and evil but the evil path doesn't makes sense with the games themes. There would be no way to tell that story with an evil character but people expect it, so its there. Mass effect handles this pretty well by not giving the players a choice outside the story.
Or walking dead 2.
Tl:DR: designers need to have a coherent and compelling story and have their choices work towards that goal.
I am right in that boat of people who stopped halfway through ME2. I don't know the actual consequences, but I heard that in the final mission People Will Die if you don't have everything upgraded or something, for which side missions and planet mining is important. And then my mind's eye goes towards wasting valuable hours of my life combing planet surfaces with my probe gun thing...and it gets really hard to care about seeing the story at all. Now if those side games had been fun...
I'm generally not a replay/reread/rewatch kinda guy. There are exceptions though. And for those games you're absolutely bang on - they're the ones that are fun to PLAY. Their stories are basically irrelevant. And for those games with Story and Meaningful Choices? If I'm curious about how things might have been, I'll just google it. And in the case of The Walking Dead, I would have preferred staying in the dark, forever plagued by what might have been.
The point being, yes, if your game isn't fun first (or very short) no one will care to see your replayable narrative. And hell, that might be best. Sometimes the point is to feel that your choices were meaningful AT THE TIME, and if you can dissuade players from going back and seeing how inconsequential their choices were so much the better. In a way, TWD's boring gameplay is a feature not a failing.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
What I was objecting to was your claim that the creation of what would be essentially 4-hour Twine games with shiny graphics* would be the moment when "gaming is going to get even more popular".
I get that you think the shooty bits are an impediment to you enjoying another playthrough of BioShock Infinite, because you're primarily concerned with the narrative.
Which is a fine opinion to have, but I'm skeptical that, on average, that a theoretical BioShock Infinite: Now With Less Shooting would have more commercial appeal, primarily since I'm not really sure that the majority of folks who buy a game that's part of a first-person shooter franchise are sitting their gritting their teeth while playing the shooting bits.
I am even less convinced by your argument that adult gamers don't have the time to commit to 8-hour games, when they have time to commit themselves to TV series that are 5 to 10 times as long, and when "binge-watching" entire seasons of TV shows is a thing.
*Not that I'd be averse to 4-hour Twine games with shiny graphics.
Although as others point out it may be that movies and books fail too - maybe half the people who start watching any given movie give it up halfway through.
I would bet a substantial amount of money that more people have tried to read just about any "important" work of literature of a certain length (for example, Infinite Jest or Moby Dick) and given up before finishing than have played Mass Effect and given up before the end.
Does that mean that Melville and Wallace weren't interesting enough?
The idea that a game narrative "fails" if more than an arbitrary number of people stop playing before the end is a rather odd claim to make, especially since you're failing to consider that other folks play those same games more than once.
For example, I've played Mass Effect, all the way through, trying to do as much side content as possible, at least five times, probably more.
For just about every narrative game, there's a portion of the player base that has given up before finishing it, and another portion that has played it multiple times.
The bigger question is "why does this matter?"
Why is it important, at all, if some percentage of people never finish a game?
Would you use that as a metric for criticizing literary works? TV shows?
What percentage of players completing a game (and let's assume that's even tracked accurately) makes a game a "success"?
Do any such games even exist?
I mean, I personally don't care about any game's story. Certainly not to the point where I've wanted to replay a game just for that. I know that's not a normal opinion around here, but I do think everyone has that same feeling to some degree.
If a game isn't fun to actually play, there's no way I'm going to replay it for narrative choices. If a game is fun to play, I will play it again even if the story is the same every time. If a game isn't that unfun to play, and there are narrative choices, I might make a split save game so that I can explore different options. It's unlikely that I'll restart a game I don't like if that means I have to play a bunch of stuff I'm not interested just to get to what I want.
By way of illustration, here some games that I have replayed, even though the narrative is barely there, or even straight-up awful: Ninja Gaiden Black, Mega Man X 1-3, Ninja Gaiden 2, Tales of Symphonia.
Here are games that I have quit playing, or will never replay, even though I didn't mind, or even liked, the narrative, and was presented with plenty of choices: Mass Effect, KOTOR 1+2, Dragon Age 2.
I stopped playing them because they were not fun to actually play. No amount of narrative complexity or whatever else is going to get me to keep playing a game that doesn't have enjoyable gameplay.
You want me to replay your game 5 times? Focus on making it fun to play 5 times instead of focusing 5 different narrative choices. That's where replay value comes from. (Not to say that I wouldn't be even more happy with a game that I wanted to replay anyway, because I enjoyed the gameplay, but that also gave me different narrative options each time.)
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella? Here's your chance.
stream
That said, I could easily see a Bioshock Infinite style narrative that was basically a Visual Novel with various diverging paths. You could maintain much of what made Infinite great (music, art design, setting) while allowing a branching story with different emphases and endings. I am actually a little surprised that something like this hasn't been tried in the West with the Urban Fantasy set.
There are a lot of people who just don't finish games. When it comes to videogame stories, you can't deny that Mass Effect is one of the best, yet even for Bioware's epic, only half of the people who play it finish it. That reflects more on the people and not the game, I think.
But even then, it has to be really well done and still you're likely capture lightning in a bottle. It doesn't even have to be "gamey". I salivated waiting for every new episode of The Walking Dead from Telltale. I played every one the night they went up. It was compelling and not such a huge time sink that I felt I was slogging through something just to see how it played out. There's not much "game" to it other than moving your character about and making some interactions, but the quality of the narrative kept me going.
But now Season 2 is out and I have had zero interest. I know it's probably crafted to the same high standard of the first yet I have no desire to revisit those characters. Out of apathy? Knowing it'll be 5 bucks on everything in 6 months? I don't know the answer.
The first factor is the buyer's expectation that they should get twenty to forty hours of gameplay out of a big budget triple A title. I can definitely relate to that. If I'm going to spend $50 on a game, I want to get a good value for my money. If the story, art direction, and gameplay are good enough I can be happy with a shorter game, like Brothers, but only if I'm not expected to shell out $50 for it. The money isn't a huge issue now that I'm older, but when I was a teenager, it would have been reasonable for me to only buy four to six games a year. I wanted those games to last.
The second factor is the producer's desire to show off a feature that they spent years building and fine tuning. I'm sure a great deal of effort was put into the combat mechanics of Bioshock Infinite. Everything from creating a variety of Tonics for the player to use, the feel of the weapons, the sound effects, the art assets. They spent a lot of time making that. If they cut the amount of combat in half, or to a third of what it was, I'm sure that it might start to feel like the amount of man-hours they were spending, vs. the amount of use the assets would get would start to feel a little unbalanced. Could you really justify years of work for an hour or two of gameplay?
Some players want the games for it's gamey aspects, like combat, and others want it for the narrative. By trying to appeal to both, they leave both unsatisfied. Of course every developer wants to make it's game appealing to both types of gamers. If you spend that much money, you want the highest possible return on investment. You're not going to get that, unless you appeal to as broad a user base as possible.
I feel like the solution is right there, it just needs to be embraced. If you make your core game relatively short and narratively rich, you open it up to the possibility of real replayability for the player base who wants that sort of thing. Meanwhile, you've spent all this effort to work on a cool combat system without getting a whole lot of mileage out of it. You could make a separate single player experience that focuses on the combat, but only has light narrative content, with no decision making. You could throw all the combat you want, you could make score attack modes to encourage people to do better. Since you've already built the art assets, and the combat crowd doesn't care about the story much, it would be easy to re-use the assets from the main story. It doesn't need to be a tacked on feature. You could make it a side story to the main narrative, something like playing one of the resistance in Infinite.
In my scenario, a guy who is most interested in the story plays the narrative mode through three or four different times, gets to experience the effects of his choices on the world, and still gets his twenty hours of enjoyment. The guy who doesn't really care about the story mode plays through it one time, and then spends fifteen to twenty hours on the more combat focused side.
Obviously not every game developer is going to want to do this, there is still plenty of space for Brothers, or for CoD. It really would be to the benefit of games like Bioshock Infinite though which really has not only a narrative dissonance with the amount of combat, but also a logical one. Where the hell were those endless hordes of baddies swarming in from anyhow?