Games versus stories

[Student of Trinity]

Benjamin Schumacher, the theoretical physicist who is best known for coining the term 'qubit' for a quantum bit, once suggested to me that some people are story thinkers, and others are game thinkers. Ben is hardly anyone to take a simplistic dichotomy too seriously; his work is about blurring the line between zero and one, after all. But I think he had a point, that "What does happen?" and "What could happen?" are different enough as ways of thinking that it's hard to follow one seriously without losing all sight of the other, at least at the time.

 

How much would it take to turn one of Jeff's games into a decent novel? I think that practically anything could serve as a mere idea for a good novel to be based upon, but I'm wondering whether one could really translate quite a lot of a game into a book, directly. Could it go as far as taking fight scenes straight from game battles, for instance, and work without having to add masses more dialog that isn't present in the game?

 

What are the chances of producing a really good story from a game? Do any of Jeff's games somehow contain the essential ingredients for making a fine story, or are they all doomed to mediocrity as stories, because of basic features they have, from being games?

 

Are there any good stories that could be made into a good Spiderweb game (in precisely the way that won't ever happen because Jeff can't afford to pay royalties)?

 

I have a vague feeling that I may have started a thread like this once before, but if so I think it must have been a while ago, so maybe it can have a second round, if indeed this is that.

 

I've been losing touch with things here like that a bit over the past year or two. Not because anything has particularly gone downhill here, as far as I can tell, but rather for the good reason that some big things I've always wanted to do have begun to seem possible, with enough more work. I'm going for it, so I have less time to spare than I used to have. I doubt I'll disappear completely. For one thing, there is a lot of collective wisdom here about how games and stories work, and my interest in such topics seems to be an obsession that isn't going away.

[Edgwyn]

I think that the various Spiderweb titles could be turned into novels, but I do believe that more dialog would need to be added. Most novels provide some insight into the characters during fight scenes (dialogue or character thoughts) that Jeff, true to the RPG trope leaves to the player. In my opinion, if any game had some much dialogue that it could be turned straight into a novel, there would not be much point in playing it as it would leave nothing to the player.

 

Avadon would be a little easier than Exile and its spinoffs simply because there is only one blank slate without a personality in Avadon versus 4-6 in the Exile series'. I do not think that you could write an interesting novel without fleshing out the blank slates that are the PCs by providing them personality and dialogue (which I assume that the players do in their heads, but a reader is less likely to do).

[Mistah Q]

I think Geneforge could make quite an interesting novel... but I'll wait for the movie to come out.

[Earth]

I think Geneforge could make quite an interesting novel... but I'll wait for the movie to come out.

 

year 2069?

[Alorael at Large]

This is well-trodden ground, but I'll trot it all out again.

 

 

Movies and novels are quite different as media, but games are far from both of them. Games can be carried hugely by the interactive component, the gameplay, all those elements that aren't just the story and its delivery. Consequently, most games wouldn't work as stories at all. Some games could, kind of, with adaptation. But Spiderweb games? No. You could use them as inspiration, but they have fatal flaws. Silent, generic protagonists. Lots of combat based exploration where the combat is game-oriented rather than story-oriented. Exploration downtime.

 

You could take the overall plot of Spiderweb's games and make novels, but the novels would be rather loose adaptations. Necessarily so; try stringing together the dialogue from game scripts and you get incoherence.

 

—Alorael, who also thinks Spiderweb's games suffer from generic world. Yes, he's world-building geek, and not everyone shares his biases, but the settings really all hinge on one cool idea with the usual generic fantasy bolted on. Avernum has its underground world. Geneforge has shaping. Avadon has, well, Avadon and the Pact. But a book might need a little bit more detail than the games provide, and it's best if the detail is novel (pun noted) and interesting.

[Kelandon]

I don't think Geneforge would work as a novel because of the branching paths. The dialogue is often fairly different depending on which side you're on, especially the plot-crucial dialogue.

 

There's something about Avadon and, perhaps, the Second Avernum Trilogy that make them seem less novel-like and more game-like to me. You'd think that linear progression would lend itself better to novel adaptation, but they seem more about doing and less about finding out. Skill progression and combat puzzles really carry Avadon; in terms of plot development, there really isn't a lot. Spidweb is often praised for the plot, but that's kind of wrong: good writing, characterization, and scene-setting are fundamentally different from a good plot. The mystery of exploration in Exile 1 could carry a novel; the gradual achievements of finishing dungeons in Avadon could not.

 

Or maybe it's that you could make Exile 1 into a novel without much difficulty because there wasn't a lot of graphical complexity in the first place. Most of the time, it was like reading a novel. Avadon, which was born visually complex, is more about seeing the world and less about reading about it.

 

Even with Exile 1, though, you'd have to add a lot of stuff. Yes, it would make sense to add inter-party dynamics, and you'd have to have descriptions in place of a lot of the (even crude) graphics. But it would still be recognizably Exile, and it wouldn't be awful, whereas I think you probably couldn't do that with Avadon and you'd lose a lot with Geneforge.

[Mistah Q]

I wonder if rather than a traditional novel, the Avernums and especially the Geneforges could function as... Choose Your Own Adventure Books. (Remember those? )

[Edgwyn]

I do remember them, but there still needs to be more from the protagonist. I do think that it would be possible to flesh out the story of the evil empire exiling people into the underground cavern and the various things that happen. For that matter, there is even room for a couple of prequels, but it would be as Alorael said, a lot of adaption. I do think that it is possible that SoT's "essential ingredients of a fine story" are there, but there would have to be major additions of dialogue, protagonist development and backstory.

[Mistah Q]

Could always go the excessive narrative route. "He slowly, painstakingly picked up his sword and crept toward his foe as the dappled glow of the fungal light obscured the full scale of the strain upon his brow. This was no ordinary spider, but one that could understand him and even speak to him. These lot were friendlier than the ones he'd met before and a twinge of regret coursed through him as he understood he was about to strike down one of the rare creatures that didn't want to kill him back, but still, treasure... "

 

I mean, Walt Whitman used a whole chapter just to say "the whale was white."

[Lilith]

I don't think Geneforge would work as a novel because of the branching paths. The dialogue is often fairly different depending on which side you're on, especially the plot-crucial dialogue.

 

the traditional solution to this problem is to pick one path and go with it. over in Japan anime adaptations of visual novel games have worked that way for years; i imagine the upcoming mass effect movie is going to do something similar, if it ever comes out

[Kelandon]

the traditional solution to this problem is to pick one path and go with it. over in Japan anime adaptations of visual novel games have worked that way for years; i imagine the upcoming mass effect movie is going to do something similar, if it ever comes out

Yeah, I just feel it's less Geneforge-y if you do that. The whole point of Geneforge is to figure out what you think of these weird options, and without actively making tricky choices, it becomes less interesting.

 

Maybe that's not true. Maybe Geneforge 1 would be just as interesting if you just picked a side. I imagine the character that you'd want the player to be relatively mild — I'm reminded of the Myst hint book back in the day, which was a remarkably good read, for a walkthrough. It was basically a novelization of Myst, and it ended up being really well done. The author chose a pretty light touch for who the PC was, and I think it had to be that way; a really strong, definitive character for the PC wouldn't have made sense.

[BainIhrno]

I'm often picturing Of Good and Evil, a Blades of Exile scenario by Alcritas, which is currently in beta testing for a port to Blades of Avernum as a movie - I could see a lot of potential here, but for the movie to be good, it would almost have to be a big-budget film, and getting people to the theaters to see it could be a challenge, as almost no one outside of Spiderweb has ever heard of it, and historically, movies based from games generally aren't received well. I could picture a film though that if people were seeing it, they'd have a hard time believing it came from a game as opposed to a novel. A fantasy film receiving Metacritic.com scores of 95+ however, could provoke interest.

 

It's also by no means a happy ending fairy tale, and (in my vision) would probably be a very dark film (that's not to say there isn't hope or good anywhere - I thought "The Dark Knight", for example, suffered from not offering any good or worthy cause worth fighting for).

 

If you play BoA, once I release the scenario, you'll see what I mean, and you can always play it in BoE, if you can get a working copy.

[Triumph]

I think G1 could be converted into a fun of fantasy-mystery novel. Most of the game is a story of exploration and discovery, and it could offer a reasonably definite conclusion. The decision to join one of servile sects (or none at all) doesn't have as drastic an effect on the game in G1 as faction-joining in later games does. The only major choice a writer would have to make (that would significantly affect how the story is told) is what to do about the Geneforge (help Goettsch, help Trajkov, destroy it, use it, etc.).

 

I don't feel like G2 or G3 would make very satisfying novels - not sure why. I guess G2 has lots of exploration, but lacks the level of mystery-solving to carry the plot that G1 does. G3 has a clearer plot, but it's still one of the weakest links in the series, and the end ("and so the giant war began") is unsatisfying (both in the sense that it feels the PC's actions didn't matter, and in the sense that it feels incomplete - "Wait, what? You stop the story right as the giant war begins???").

 

G4 has one more of the steadily driving along plots in the series, some solid recurring cast members (rare for a Spiderweb game), and the double-agent PC. It could make a decent novel. G4's biggest weakness, IMO, would be the ending, which is which doesn't offer much sense of conclusion. G5 I think would turn into one of those 1-ton fantasy / war epic / political intrigue type novels, with all its factions and faction leaders. More so than G1 or G4, one big hurdle would be deciding which faction the protagonist would join.

 

A lot of the Avernum games remind me of G2 - lots of fun exploration and stuff to do, excellent games, but not enough overarching plot throughout the game the build an interesting novel upon. I love A:EFTP and A6, but I don't think they hold potential for good novels. A collection of cool quests and subplots do not a great novel plot make. A2 would probably make the best choice for a novel out of any of them - it has a good clear progression from the mystery of the barriers to meeting the Vahnati (sp?) to the climax of winning the war / driving the Empire out.

 

Avadon...bleh. I find the setting and story of the Avadon games so disappointing and derivative that I can't muster up even faux excitement for a novelization. Look, it's the U.N., with giants, wizards, and goblins! Plenty of predictably political intrigue, betrayal, revenge, and futility. Thrilling.

 

I'm really disappointed that no one has mentioned Nethergate in this thread!!! Since it is the best Spiderweb game, of course it would make the best Spiderweb game novel! It's got a phenomenal setting, some really cool creative elements, and one of the stronger plots in a SW game. I think it would probably need to alternate chapters between the Celt protagonist(s) and the Roman protagonist(s), culminating in the confrontation atop the Spire of Ages. Nethergate and G1 would be my top picks for game-to-novel conversion.

[Sudanna]

I think it goes without saying that any absolutely direct translation of most video games into any other medium is ludicrous.

 

That said, I don't know that the difference between what does happen and what could happen is all that relevant to most games or how people think about them. Very rarely is anything of great consequence all that subject to change, unless it's within very tightly-prescribed confines. With most games, I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'd rather be doing in this world/as this character instead of what a game is making me do. The difference between what does happen and what could happen is more a feature of thinking critically about a story.

 

I don't think that you need to change a story from game form to novel form to make it good, unless your standard of "good" requires the conventions of novels. Geneforge and Nethergate are plenty good stories as they are. So are a bunch of non-Spiderweb games. You could probably make good novels using those ideas, but they're already good games using those ideas.

[Goldengirl]

Sure, a lot of dialogue would have to be added. How many of the "great" characters that recur from game to game are really just Bobs that provide useful exposition from previous games?

 

At the same time, though, so much would have to be taken out! The things that make for a great puzzle in a game would probably be ceaselessly boring to read about. The pitter-patter dialogue that the PC has with every single character in every area is tedious. This doesn't just apply to the banal interactions with merchants or quest-givers, but even some of the people in areas that are supposed to provide information and exposition would be hard to transfer while still being anything near entertaining.

[Triumph]

I suspect the transition from game to book would be similar to the transition from book to movie. The LotR films provide a well-known, big-budget example of that phenomenon. OF COURSE there are elements of the first medium that absolutely don't translate into the second medium (at least not if you actually want the final product to be GOOD). This is true of any two mediums (video games, books, movies, television, radio, plays, TCGs, anything I'm leaving out). Each medium has certain distinct qualities that none of the others captures (that's why we have all of them). Anyone who seriously expects a property that undergoes the conversion process (from one medium to another) to perfectly replicate all features of the original in a new medium is unreasonable.

 

However, that's really not the issue. The question is whether a property that originates in one medium can be transferred into another medium and result in a creation that is "good" in terms of that medium and that retains essential elements that made the original good. This feat is quite possible. In the case of the OP, I think there certainly are SW games that could provide the foundation for fun, interesting novels.

Edited May 27, 2014 by Triumph
Disclaimer: I do NOT unconditionally endorse the LotR films; Peter Jackson et al. got a lot right, but they also botched the job on a number of points. I cite the films only as illustration, not to give my full approval to them.

[Slawbug]

I think you could make one of the Geneforge games function in novel/movie form, without destroying the critical what-do-I-do junctures, by having a protagonist who is ethically concerned and sees the good in both sides. Essentially, a Khyryk. This might actually work best in G3.

[Lilith]

plus it's not like every geneforge game except 5 doesn't have a canon ending as determined by its sequel anyway, it's just sometimes it doesn't line up precisely with any of the endings actually available in the previous game

[Student of Trinity]

Probably Geneforge is the best candidate, from among Jeff's games. You could maybe turn the five games into a trilogy. It might all work best as Young Adult fiction, with volumes around 80K words. I think it would take a lot of treatment, but the story might gain enough impetus from the games' premises that it would be worth using the games as a basis, rather than simply starting from scratch. There are settings and confrontations in the games that I think could work well.

 

I think that one of the basic differences between stories and games is in what it takes to make something seem real. In a story, I think you tend to accept something when it has clear material and efficient causes: you can see how it works and how it comes about. Something that just suddenly appears out of nowhere, and does what it does only because the author says it does, does not seem real, in a story.

 

I think that those things matter less in a game, because you don't have time to absorb all that detail anyway. Instead I think you're more convinced by formal and final causes. Does this thing seem to fit with the rest of the game? And can I use it to achieve some purpose? In a game, a light saber can fall from the sky, and I'll still take it seriously, if a glowing sword fits the game's graphical style, and if I get to pick it up and chop monsters with it.

 

I wonder whether that has anything to do with the opposite ways that possibilities either expand or contract over time, in games and stories. In both games and stories, the number of possible things that you might in principle expect to see usually starts off large, and gets smaller, as you learn what's really going on. But in games, it's not mainly about what you get to see; it's more about what you get to do. The number of things available to do usually starts off small, and gets larger.

 

So stories seem to me to be about shrinking the range of possibilities, whereas games are about expanding it. A story is unsatisfying if the actual ending seems to be no more likely than many alternatives, while a game with many equally viable endings seems to be the better for that.

 

This suggests that turning a good game into a good story, or vice versa, is likely to be hard. It means taking one of many game endings and making it inevitable, or opening up serious alternatives at a story's major plot cruxes. This is bound to be hard, because you're working against your starting material.

 

If you pulled it off, though, you might really have something: explanations that ruled out a lot of alternatives convincingly, or choices that really made a big difference. It seems as though it ought to be possible for someone who really knew what they were doing to make a really great game out of a good story, or vice versa. Why do I feel, however, that in fact this has never been done?

[Edgwyn]

Years after the original modules were published TSR (or Wizards of the Coast) had a couple of authors turn several of the classic AD&D modules into novels. I expect that the process of doing that would be very similar to turning a SW game into a novel. As I remember, they added personality and backstory to the protagonists and simplified the adventuring piece.

[Mistah Q]

The first Warcraft games had a lot less depth than any Spiderweb game. "Kill the orcs" "Why" "They're attacking" "Why" "Because they're bad." "By the way here's some filler background story."

 

And those have spawned quite numerous novels.

[Alorael at Large]

Spawned, sure, but they are all, to my limited knowledge, stories set in the same world, using and expanding on the filler background story, not stories that are literal retelling of the levels.

 

—Alorael, who thinks that's exactly the same solution, to a lesser extent, that would have to be applied to most RPGs. You'd need to cut down the parts that are fun to play but boring to retell (often combat, methodical exploration) and focus on parts that do make for good novels (characters and inter-character drama, the findings of exploration).

[Sudanna]

I dunno why you're talking about the difference between stories and games as if the two were entirely different or something. Games contain and deliver stories, at least some of them. Games and writing are both mediums for the delivery of stories, among other things.

 

What it takes for something to seem real is very different from game to game. I'll accept shooting fireballs and changing size in Super Mario Bros., because Mario is a surrealist fever dream far removed from how I'd expect my world to work. That easy acceptance does not transfer to games with more sensible rules or more cohesive worlds - if someone in Skyrim gives me something it doesn't make sense for their character to give me, however much I need it as a player, that's going to stand out as a flaw in this world.

 

Making one ending or another inevitable doesn't make that ending satisfying - it removes tension. Maybe you cannot easily have the same kind of uncertainty that exists in a game like Geneforge, where the main character can be completely different from player to player, but removing all uncertainty makes things boring. By filling the blank slate of the player character in with an actual character, much of the question over what's going to happen might be removed - or preserved, which I would find much more interesting.

 

Never mind that most games don't offer any variability in narrative beyond finishing the game or not. Call of Duty delivers a story, and that's the only story in it. The Walking Dead delivers a story too, and while there's much more room for player input on that story, it will still go to all the same places and hit most of the same beats, and the differences between what one player or another does is limited. Super Hexagon has no story at all. And then Fallout: New Vegas occupies a similar place as Geneforge. Games are very different from one another, even just in how they treat their stories, and the problems with adapting one or another would be very different.

[Student of Trinity]

I'm not sure we're necessarily taking 'games' to mean only CRPGs; I'll take those old D&D modules as a good game example. But if you can turn Tic-Tac-Toe into a novel, well, I'll give you a cookie. So games that involve a story in some sense do seem to be the topic, and so I suppose if you want you could say we're contrasting two kinds of story: game stories (like RPGs) and pure stories (like books or films). Just saying 'game' and 'story' can be an abbreviation for that.

 

The very fact that games and stories are similar in some basic ways means that there must be something that is entirely different between games and stories, because otherwise we wouldn't even recognize them as being basically different things, which we do. Not every individual game or story may emphasize the difference to the same degree, but I take it for granted that hardly anything is exactly described by a single "choose A or B" bit of information. There really are distinctions, however, that deserve to be mentioned first before others, because they tell you more of what you want to know. If you try to tell someone how you just wasted three hours, but refuse to even mention the game/story distinction while describing your pastime, your listener will soon get annoyed and try to stop all your beating around the bush, by asking you whether this thing is a story or a game.

 

Anyway, that's my current view of ontology as data compression. I'm trying to understand aesthetics as data compression, too. I think we like narratives because our brains like data compression. Short is sweet. An especially good story is one that can be compressed especially much, with especially little loss. That doesn't mean the story is just simple — that wouldn't leave much to compress. We like to feel that there's a lot of story to tell, but, 'And yet it all makes sense because ...' can be followed by something short and sweet, that makes you nod your head.

 

In a pure story, I think we want the short-and-sweet to come from some kind of reveal, that makes you see a new way of organizing the complex picture. In a game, I think maybe we want short-and-sweet to come from some clever strategy that eliminates a lot of otherwise necessary activity. We don't want the simplifying strategy to be too obvious, because that means there's no real compression involved, but we want to be able to find such strategies. A game where the only option is just to grind ahead seems like a worse game for that, whatever redeeming qualities it may otherwise have.

 

If that's at all right, then maybe the best way to convert good games and stories into one another would be to try to turn killer tactics into major plot turns, or vice versa. If the killer strategy is to combine archer and tank, then the story is how Jack and Jill learn to fight orcs together. If the critical plot twist is Jack leaving Jill, then you make a game where having the tank abandon the archer is a killer strategy.

[Kelandon]

"Story" is probably not the word that you want, here. It's confusing. Computer games have stories. Novels have stories. Movies have stories. They just present them differently. You sounded initially as if you meant "novel" when you said "story." Now, as often, I'm not sure what you mean and I'm not sure you know either, unless you do actually just mean "novel" and are using the wrong word.

[Randomizer]

But if you can turn Tic-Tac-Toe into a novel, well, I'll give you a cookie.

Think of Mad magazine's feature "Spy vs Spy" with less action description as the heroic X fights the evil O over and over again. Here you really need to describe their motivation to keep facing each other on the mundane battlefield since the action part is so boring.

[Sudanna]

Yeah, what Kelandon said.

 

I dunno about compressible stories being just plain categorically preferable to uncompressible ones. Plenty of the stories I like take me a long time to explain to my satisfaction, and the finicky little details are what I like about them anyways. Shortening a story can cut out what makes it special. Shortcuts in game mechanics are called "exploits", and much frowned upon. There's something to be said for mechanical or narrative elegance, but big, messy systems have their own appeal as well. Less is only sometimes more, and only to some people.

 

It's sounding like what you really want is to find ways to tell a story or make a point or just inspire an emotion purely with the language of game mechanics. You are, luckily, not the first: there are a ton of games and gamemakers trying to do exactly that thing in interesting ways, and the best thing would be to try and play some. Check out the indiest of the indie scene - there's a lot of raw ideas and strong personalities there, and a lot of that stuff is free. Some higher-profile, retail-level games try and stick to that design philosophy as well, at least to some degree. There are as many mechanics as there are sentences, and as many ways to put them together as there are to make a paragraph. If you want somewhere to start, I could give you a few names or resources for both games and critical dissection of them.

 

But really, the best place to start is to really think, really hard and really critically, about how the games you already know work - there's at least a grain of mechanics-as-language in every one, and some attempt to translate a game into a human reaction from the player.

 

Also, games are multimedia things. Don't get hung up on mechanics just because they're the unique part of the medium - films need good writing and good visuals, for the most part. Take things in context - an archer leaving a tank could be a story about heartless abandonment or a story about escape from abuse or a story about hard choices or a dozen other things, depending on how it's framed. And of course most of the time nothing really means anything more than what you're willing to read into it.

[Alorael at Large]

I agree that story isn't a great term, but their isn't a much better, brief word for what SoT is trying to express and I don't think this is a confusion of meaning problem. He's talking games, which are interactive media that can (but don't necessarily) tell stories, versus comics, novels, films, even probably ballads and epic poems. Anything that conveys a story to an observer who is a non-participant. The big difference here is interaction.

 

—Alorael, who is otherwise completely unsold by the data compression analogy and even more dubious about the strategy to plot comparison. Because although SoT may have confused himself, games and other media both have plots, and the plot of a game may be Jack leaving Jill just as easily as the plot of a non-game. In fact, you can convey the same plot via very different mechanics; there's no obvious barrier to making a war story an RPG, a strategy game, a first-person shooter, or an arcade-style scrolling shooter. You could also tell that story in novel, film, or poem. But even though the plot is the same the way it's taken in will be influenced by media. Films come across differently from book; games are different from both, and different types of game work differently there too.

[adc.]

I don't know about this, but I'd choose to live with both. Although I am slightly biased to games, not stories, well to be more specific, "novels", do novels count? Of course it does, well, dammit Kel, your post made a point. Amaranth is confused. Amaranth hurt himself in confusion D:

 

Let's just assume novels count as stories. When we went back to our home country at 2010, I brought my netbook with me and spent the whole vacation playing TF2 with me having fun with 10 fps. I did have fun killing bots, raising levels harder, playing 1 v 1 against my brother with us having the Cloak and Dagger invis watch equipped.

 

By 2012, dad bought me this Win 8 i5 laptop for Christmas and then I unleashed my l337 5k1llz against those who laughed at my once sluggish reflexes. By 2013, we went back again to our home country for a vacation. My father didn't allow us to bring our laptops anymore since he assumed we would just repeat the play-all-day long thing at vacation. So I brought with me my The Alchemist novel written by Paolo Coelho, a novel which our English teacher told us to read as part of the curriculum. Well, I didn't get the story at first, so I re-read the novel on my free time. And every time I opened the book, I learned something new.

 

Conclusion:

Using TF2 as an example of a nice but story-less game and a well-made novel, I think novels would benefit me more.

[Kelandon]

I agree that story isn't a great term, but their isn't a much better, brief word for what SoT is trying to express and I don't think this is a confusion of meaning problem. He's talking games, which are interactive media that can (but don't necessarily) tell stories, versus comics, novels, films, even probably ballads and epic poems. Anything that conveys a story to an observer who is a non-participant. The big difference here is interaction.

It sounds like the terms you want are "lean forward" and "lean back." Transitioning a... product/artwork/thing... from a lean forward medium to a lean back medium or vice-versa is, indeed, quite challenging; if that's what we're talking about, I can think of few really good examples of successes, especially if we want a really faithful adaptation (and probably we mean as faithful as the Watchmen movie and not, say, X-Men 3).

 

Tomb Raider, maybe? The games did well, and the movies did well, though I don't know how faithful they were. Or, again, the original Myst hint book, which was basically a novelization of Myst.

[Lilith]

Think of Mad magazine's feature "Spy vs Spy" with less action description as the heroic X fights the evil O over and over again.

 

isn't that basically just the ending of WarGames

[Slawbug]

I think 'story' is an okay term, but I disagree that stories in novel form are any 'purer' than stories in game form. You can have games with no story content, but you can also have books with no story content. Athletic games and nonfiction typically have no story content; FPS's and poems may or may not have story content; console RPGs and novels almost always do.

 

In other words: I think medium is totally severable from story content. Genre (and even macrogenre) are far more tied to it.

 

Kel, there's a question here of faithfulness in letter versus in spirit, right? It's basically impossible to do the former for a game with blank-slate PCs, but the latter at least _can_ be done well. One example that comes to mind is the novelization of _Pool of Radiance_, which, though quite different from the game, involves all the same stuff, in exactly the same plot arc, and has a very similar feel to it.

[Sudanna]

That Pool of Radiance book was my very first ever fantasy novel back when I was about eight or nine, and set me on the dark road I now tread.

[Student of Trinity]

As I said in my first post, I didn't invent this story/game distinction. The discussion in which I heard it took place in 1996, about. By 'story' and 'game' we had in mind books and boardgames as canonical examples, though we were willing to let the terms get worn wherever they would fit without too much stretching. You young whippersnappers are confusing me, with your newfangled computer games, consarn it.

 

Do you think about what does in fact happen, or about all the things that could in principle happen? To some extent you think about what might happen even in re-reading a novel, of course, but you normally don't think about alternatives nearly as seriously when it's not up to you to choose among them. Games should be optimized for having multiple alternative plot sequences. Stories should be optimized for having just one. There's no need to be naive about what constitutes 'optimal' in either case, but the difference between one and many is going to be major no matter what kind of quality it is at which you aim.

 

This is a pretty radical difference, in my view, and I think it's simpler and more basic than everything else. If you have the job of turning a good game into a good story, or the other way around, then you will have a ton of work of all kinds to do, but I think the first thing you should do is sit down and decide how you're going to switch between one and many. Get that right, and you'll be off to a fair start. Screw that up, and I think your project is crippled.

[Kelandon]

Games should be optimized for having multiple alternative plot sequences.

This is not really true at all. Many very good games have basically only one plot sequence. It's not all Geneforge out there.

[Sudanna]

Yeah, games allow for player-directed variability, but that's not all there is for them. And considering how consistently games made specifically with that goal in mind get it completely wrong, "allow for" may be just a hypothetical.

[Slawbug]

Games should be optimized for having multiple alternative plot sequences. Stories should be optimized for having just one.

Let me join the train of people who disagree with this assertion. WHY "should" things be this way?

[Student of Trinity]

It's trivially true: you have to be able to do things, in a game, and what happens has to seem decent for many different choices of what to do. There may not be more than one ending, but there have to be many ways of reaching the ending, or else no-one will consider it a game. There might be only one 'right' sequence of things to do, but the game has to work, in some sense, for multiple sequences. If you try the wrong things, the game has to respond in some reasonable way that guides you toward the right choice, next play-through. In general, a game has to work well, for some value of 'well', under many different conditions of player choice.

 

Stories don't do that at all. There is only one sequence. That's all the audience ever sees. Moreover, a story has to leave people happy in spite of there only being one choice.

 

This is a major difference, it seems to me — trivial to state, but enormous in its implications for what you actually have to do, to make a game or story.

 

If you still disagree, have you made both a game and a story? If so, do you at least see that it might reasonably seem to make a big difference? If again so, can you say why it turns out to make less difference than one would think? If either of these last two 'ifs' returns 'false', then, um, hmmm. Try to say something I'll understand. Help me out, here.

[Sudanna]

In a completely pedantic sense, yes, games have to allow for multiple potential plot sequences, if you include things like "the player took a path through this level that was three degrees off from their previous path through the level" as a plot sequence. In many games - overwhelmingly, most games - the events of the narrative are completely linear and removed from the player's ability to effect them. I can play Half Life 2 a bunch of times in a bunch of different ways, mechanically, but all the characters are still going to do and say the exact same things almost without exception. And that's okay; impacting the plot is not why I would want to play Half Life 2. I do things in HL2 that are essentially segregated from the plot, and those are enough reason for me to want to play the game. This is the setup that, again, overwhelmingly most games make use of.

 

Some games do offer me the ability to impact the story in a meaningful way, and I enjoy and appreciate that. Some games use token player choices as so much marketing fluff, and that can be interesting, inconsequential, or extremely frustrating. All of these approaches are equally games and equally stories. There are also games that eschew story entirely - Minecraft is storyless, not to mention something like Tetris or Pong. This game/story dualistic universe you're putting forth is just not making any sense. What games do you play, SoT?

[keira]

a story has to leave people happy

wat.

 

some of the best storied i've read/watched/played are the ones that don't leave me happy. Just because a story doesn't end with some disney fairytale rubbish doesn't mean it's a story

Edited June 3, 2014 by sylae
"satisfied", perhaps?

[Randomizer]

Back in the 1971 there was a made for TV movie where every 15 minutes or so the viewers got to pick between two way the story could go. One was a romance where the lead went off to help a near sighted woman whose glasses he broke and the other was a spy story. You would get choices like in the spy story go with the police or jump in a river to escape. Viewers got to pick until they reach the end and then the other path from the first choice was gone through to reach its end.

 

Decisions! Decisions!

news story on movie

[Kelandon]

This is a major difference, it seems to me — trivial to state, but enormous in its implications for what you actually have to do, to make a game or story.

Okay, you've convinced me that you are actually talking about the lean back/lean forward distinction (not about "games" and "stories" in any normal sense of those two terms), because what you're saying is more or less definitional for that distinction.

 

I have no idea what you mean by "enormous in its implications," though. It seems to me that the implications are as large as the freedom that the game gives the player. A game like The Room gives the player almost no ability to do anything but what is absolutely required. Yes, you can spin the view at whim, but each puzzle has only one solution, and the game basically doesn't respond to anything but the right set of steps. You tap on the screen until you tap in the right place; nothing else happens. On the other hand, a game like one in the Geneforge Series changes large amounts of dialogue, etc., based on your choices (and some BoE scenarios even more so). Responsiveness is a characteristic of lean-forward media, but the degree of responsiveness varies greatly. So what are these enormous implications, then?

 

I ask this especially in light of the fact that good authors are often thinking about their audiences' reactions, even in lean-back media. Yes, the story is set, but the game is set, too; either way, you have to think about how the audience will respond.

 

Also, in a certain sense, it's quite common to shift something from a lean-forward medium to a lean-back medium. That's what a Let's Play is, after all. Spiderweb games make for pretty good LPs, or so I'm led to believe.

[Slawbug]

It's trivially true: you have to be able to do things, in a game, and what happens has to seem decent for many different choices of what to do. There may not be more than one ending, but there have to be many ways of reaching the ending, or else no-one will consider it a game... Stories don't do that at all. There is only one sequence. That's all the audience ever sees.

In fact, this is trivially not true. Choose Your Own Adventure books are clearly games and not stories according to this definition; but I can't think of any definition for "story" -- common usage, dictionary, academic, you name it -- that would exclude the story told in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

 

Likewise, Kel's example of The Room. I can see how one might interpret those minor, unimpactful choices -- ability to move at your own pace and change angles, etc -- as evidence of interaction, making that more game-like than a video. Okay, let's accept that. Now, if I read a novel, I can also move at my own pace; if there are illustrations, I can choose to consider them or not; I could ask someone to read it aloud to me, with or without intonation for character speech, etc. Those things are at least as interactive as the choices available in The Room, and they are definitely a feature of the format, and one which authors are well aware of. If The Room is your 'game' than so is every novel, and I don't think there's anything left on the other side of the dichotomy.

 

I do think you're addressing an interesting distinction, but there is simply no way that "story" and "game" are appropriate words to use for it. WHY would it be so hard to simply acknowledge that and pick different terms? What does this idea gain from using two English words in ways that are unintuitive and confusing?