Anonymous asked: I know I'm a bit behind the times, but I'd like to state that emotions are not necessarily false if they are elicited. You can't possibly say that any emotion you get from playing Minecraft is any more real than an emotion you get from playing a game with a story. When you boil it down they are the same thing- emotions stirred up by game output. In Minecraft it might be fright from an enemy, pride in craftsmanship or something similarly accomplishment-based but in story games it's something a little different, not invalid, just different. In Mass Effect you have a "spoon fed" story that evokes real emotion by creating a context in which the player feels like he is (at least helping) saving the human race and the galaxy. As long as you're not a cynical ass, pay attention to the story and allow yourself to get emotionally invested it's really hard not to find yourself experiencing strong emotions when things start to happen between characters or between your avatar and the enemies. The reason why our logical brains go out the window when we feel these emotions from cut scenes is because we want to feel them, they invoke a feeling of connectivity to a greater cause than ourselves, which is something humans have an evolutionary imperative to feel. The Halo series is another great example of this. Yes it's incredibly popular and cliched and its success has damned it from becoming anything but a punchline, but it has achieved something that is truly remarkable. I don't know how many online Halo matches I've joined and found total strangers working together with something resembling harmony, I don't know how often I've played Firefight and found my teammates starting to adapt to one another's strategies. And I've haven't heard of an event since World War 2 that united as many people people as much as Halo 3's goal of achieving 10 billion Covenant kills. So before you go dismissing story and saying that gameplay is all that matters think about what you CAN get out of story instead of looking at the miserable excuse for storytelling that is pervasive in games. You yourself said that designers must innovate- find a way to integrate story and mechanics, otherwise you're just giving up like everyone else. I know it's not really a question... so I'll make one: thoughts?
this was an excellent question. apparently you sent it, like, a long time ago, but i havent logged in for a while so my bad.
after spending some time away from modern games and on drugs, i did change my mind a bit. i think plot can have a place in games, but, as you say, its usage in games is overwhelmingly bad.
i agree with koster’s thesis in A Thoery of Fun that learning is the principal activity which leads to Fun. previously to now, my position has been that a plotted story in a game is contrary to the point of a game, since it is hard-written. the player cant cognizantly maintain an internal locus of control as long as he knows the game he’s playing is on rails.
that’s still clearly true, but as of now i have softened a bit in my approach. i now believe the most important thing a plot can do in order to enhance a game is give specific feedback for specific choices. for an example everyone knows, in duse ex 1, if you kill people in the first couple levels, various characters will either give you shit or praise for it; likewise, throughout the game, you’re always receiving conflicting feedback from people with conflicting interests, but its always in response to something you specifically chose to do. msg3 had only one minor example, but it was cool anyway, basically early in the game the dialogue changes according to whether youve killed anybody or not and it serves as a simple little report card to remind the player to avoid killing (which dovetails nicely with the boss battle later in the game where you have to face every enemy you’ve killed, ofc). most modern idiot games abstract this sort of thing with morality meters, faction loyalty meters, etc. but loyalty and morality arent at all concepts which can be abstracted to a one-dimensional representation like that. it always leads to cases where you, the player, really feel like somebody in the game world ought to mention something specific about what you just did. like in olbivoin or failout 3 how you could slaughter an entire city and nobody would really mention it, they’d just sort of ambiguously dislike you.
adding fuel to that fire, in modern games, everything of specific importance happens mostly in dialogue or cutscenes; the only “choices” the game remembers are based on whether you pick the red or the green option. this automatically feels flat to us because we know that we’re playing a game and the conversations are all scripted - the conversations should respond to and provide context for things you actually do, but they alone shouldn’t constitute the thing you do. when devs dont respect this, the actual gameplay in their games becomes the palate cleanser to their ~scripted experience,~ and we end up with a bastardized movie that you play parts of for no reason.
so basically, plot as a means of providing choice feedback, but never to the point of infringing upon things the player should actually be doing himself, and never for its own sake divorced from gameplay. thanks again for the excellent question
