Conveying a message with any work of art is a tricky business. If you want to say “war is bad” you can just say “war is bad”. You don’t need to go to the trouble of painting Guernica. Understanding why its worth painting Guernica instead of just saying “war is bad” is long argument, and outside the scope of this thread, but it’s not a problem unique to games.
You can certainly create a game when the “goal” is “figure out what this means”, but that sort of directed play will feel cheesy and on-the-nose. But you can make a game where how the player tends to play will linger on in meaningful ways.
For example, in Journey, you get a bonus for sticking near the other player. This sense of “sticking together is good” becomes a strategy you subconsciously internalize. This becomes important in the snowfield section of the game where you and the other player walk together to your deaths. You don’t need to stick together to win at this point, but sticking together feels right and so most people do and that sense of marching shoulder to shoulder into the storm becomes a major emotional beat. Having an action that you perform solely because it feels like the right thing to do, not because it gains you an advantage, is one way to do meaning-making with games.
No real argument there (I was an art major for four years so it’s a little amusing when people pull out the ‘you don’t understand/appreciate art and only want pop culture stuff’ remarks) but I was referring to the scope of broad, open world free play games. If people just putter around in your game world for six months but never reach the snowfields, they never experience even your subtle messages.
I realize, of course, that it’s not binary and you can have a semi-open world or ‘guided open’ play. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is a good example, I think.
The point is not to ever provide any direction, but to move the player away from a “the worth of every move is determined by whether or not it helps you win” mentality. When you have something you’re trying hard to accomplish, you’re less likely to think about why you’re trying to accomplish it, or the meaning of the overall experience.
Here’s another example. We played through The Vanishing of Ethan Carter in the office and we agreed that it would have been a better game without the puzzles. You spend so much time trying to figure out how to unlock the next chunk of content that you don’t pay much attention to the interesting relationship between Ethan and his family. The game would have been a more powerful experience if you’d been encouraged to spend your time thinking about the significance of what you were seeing.
For me, the problem with the quote in the OP is mostly that I am not looking for those particular kinds of experiences in a game. Particularly, I doubt many games’ ability to be edifying or healing with any degree of finesse. Pro-social? Not sure what that means. WoW is pro-social, AIUI - you have to work together, deal with people etc. Enlightening is a big ask, as it is so very dependent on individuals’ backgrounds and experiences.
OTOH, a lot of games discussed in thread sound like just plain fun to me. Open-ended games like Minecraft and Skyrim are great. I haven’t played Dear Esther or To the Moon, or Journey, but they all sound like interesting, enjoyable games. What they don’t sound like is ‘healing’ or ‘edifying’ games.
Maybe ‘healing’ games include more minority or female characters, so the scars on our souls can be healed now that we are finally being included. Having all-male characters, or massively unrealistic female characters is a huge turn-off for me, so yeah, I can see the point. ‘Healing’ though, sounds pretentious.
To be more specific than “fun,” the best psychological reward for playing video games is flow. You don’t achieve flow on frivolous activities. It requires a certain level of mastery meeting a challenge. This is why skilled gamers gravitate towards hard games and complain when a game is too easy. If you’ve ever played a game and wondered where the day went you were probably in a flow state.
Here’s a bunch of reasons why video games are a dismal story telling medium:
Story is delivered by removing control from the player in the form of text dumps, cinematics, dialogue/audio logs, QTEs, etc. A lot of games wish they were movies. Story and gameplay are at war.
Difficulty wrecks pacing and if it goes too far, immersion. We’ve all played a game where we’ve been stopped dead in our tracks because we’re lost, can’t solve a puzzle, or a boss is mopping the floor with us. It’s not possible to have a one size fits all challenge.
The story is gated by large sections of gameplay, often of a repetitive nature. There might be 45 minutes of story in a 10 hour game. This doesn’t mesh. Movies and books deliver their story to you uninterrupted.
There’s usually a major disconnect between what the story is about and what the gameplay is about. At a fundamental level players want to analyze the system and its rule, complete objectives, and win. To quote this guy:
Players can wreck their own experience. When Skyrim came out everyone thought it was hilarious to put baskets on NPC heads. Or maybe a player will try to do something stupid to test the game’s rules. Or maybe they just miss something, like that ingame engine cutscene.
Heroes are effectively immortal. Yes, you die, but you return to where you left off and so the threats are diminished. The negatives of this is most readily seen when watching someone play a survival horror game. They’re in the zone and freaked out when the monster is chasing them. Then they die. They can just try again and again. Then the spell is broken. Perversely, the best design would be a monster that only seemed like it could almost kill you, but never did – a rubber band threat. But if the player knew this then it wouldn’t be scary.
This isn’t a problem for games with harsh death penalties, e.g. rogue-likes or old NES games without save features. You probably don’t want those to be 10-20 hour long games.
Heroes in many if not most games kill scores of enemies. If taken seriously, this means the hero is some sort of sociopath, really believes in the cause, or it’s OK because they’re acceptable targets, like monsters. This generally limits the types of stories you can tell.
Heroes face external obstacles. It’s hard to do internal character change in a video game, let alone linking it to gameplay in a way that isn’t contrived.
There’s a disconnect between the hero as my puppet and the hero as a living character. If you show me a sad person in a movie or a book I might feel empathy. If the video game shows me a sad character I’m controlling I probably won’t feel empathy because I’m not sad (and I’m probably kicking ass in the game’s world). The merge doesn’t happen.
It’s probably for this reason that many games seem to have the empathetic character be a sidekick NPC. And a lot of them are vulnerable females, preying upon the typical male player’s paternal instinct/protective fantasy (Clementine, Ellie, Elizabeth, Alyx, the Little Sisters). Pretty cheap.
Games can link character motivation to player goals. Like if an NPC tells the hero he wants some cool weapon, then I want it too so I can be more powerful.
marshmellow raises some very good points. Very strong arguments, there. However, I still feel that video games have the potential to approach storytelling in a way that is unprecedented in human history.
The immersiveness that a virtual reality experience can provide, and the act of making choices for one’s character are very powerful psychological forces that I believe have barely been tapped in video games.
Everything **marshmellow ** has said makes sense, and each point is certainly a problem for the high-falutin’ hopes I have for gaming. But, for truly creative games developers those points should serve as guideposts and warnings, rather than unbeatable obstacles.
Just as a personal point of reference, I have read many touching stories, stories which have edified me and enriched my experience of life itself. I’ve seen some pretty powerful movies, sequences that have gotten me excited or made me laugh. But only with (a very rare, few) video games have I broken down crying. Only with video games have I needed to take a step back and take some time to absorb what I’ve experienced.
This is certainly not a universal thing - many people have shed tears over a well-told tragedy in both literature and film. But, for me, the only the immediacy and agency that a video game can provide has what it takes to push my needle into the red, overcoming my tendency to intellectualize and giving me a truly visceral virtual experience.
We need more games, more experimentation with games, more diversity in games. And this will happen, one way or another. We will find the solutions to the limitations of our current perspectives of game design. Virtual experience is in its infancy. Imagine the wonder that is yet to come.
Interesting point. The history of games, like storytelling, goes all the way back to antiquity, be it chess, dominos, or senet. Games have always been inherently interactive, but only in modern times has storytelling and gaming been unified. (Unless anyone can think of a different example?)
Maybe you should try saying something about them other than just listing names.
It seems that Cart Life and Today I Die are both available to play for free for those who would like to try them. I’m at the office so won’t get to them until later.
See? I already did about 10x more to promote discussion of the games than you
Cow Clicker doesn’t inspire any real comment from me. It’s another satire type game like ProgressQuest and the like. It’s not “fun” but it doesn’t inspire more than momentary interest from me either. Dear Ester I own but haven’t played. Proteus I don’t own and for ten bucks it’s going to stay that way until I have a decent reason to buy it.
I’ve read Csikszentmihalyi and I don’t think this is a good representation of his work on flow. Yes, flow is the result of a close match between difficultly and ability resulting in total absorption, but this does not preclude frivolous or easy activities from triggering flow. You can slip into flow while walking through a meadow or reading a book, and it’s a misreading to associate it only with competitive striving.
Interrupting one type of game to ask the player to play a different type of game will always trigger frustration. This doesn’t mean that story and game are fundamentally incompatible, only that abrupt transitions between different types of play are problematic. Look at table-top RPGs – they manage to mix gameplay and story just fine.
I have no idea how this connects to the game/story issue.
Absolutely a problem. Story has a context and if you go too long between story beats, people forget what’s going on.
Clint Hocking calls the disconnect between play actions and narrative “ludonarrative dissonance”. In other words, “Why is my heroic character invading people’s homes and smashing their pottery.” However, I disagree with your second sentence. Mastering a system in order to win is one way to play, but not the only way. Make believe and roleplaying are a different way to play with a different logic.
Yeah, if you try to break a game you can break it. But this is true of all play experiences, not just ones that involve stories. All games require players to meet them halfway.
I know several horror designers who are wrestling with exactly this problem. On the other hand, games like Alien: Isolation are still pretty effective at delivering scares.
See ludonarrative dissonance above. Games don’t have to be about people who kill lots of enemies. In *Flower *you don’t kill anyone. And lots of action movies manage to tell reasonable stories with heroes that mow down their enemies.
Internal change comes from shift in the player’s conception of the character. But this is true of any narrative.
This is true and a real problem. The best technique for handling this is giving the player subtle gameplay cues to encourage them to roleplay the character that they’re intended to be. See my example of *Journey *in a previous post. *Ico *does this nicely as well. And an extreme example is the relationship between the player and the weighted companion cube in Portal.
Yeah, there are definitely challenges in telling good stories in games. It’s a different medium and different storytelling techniques are required. And sometimes it means avoiding certain types of gameplay altogether (like non-stop shooter mechanics). But that doesn’t mean that stories and games are fundamentally incompatible.
Also, telling a story is not the only way for a experience to be deep or powerful. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony doesn’t tell a story, but it’s still a powerful work of art. There are lots of parallels between games and music as artistic enterprises.
It’s pretty pointless for me to ramble on about them if no one else has played them, but since Cow Clicker is pretty well documented:
Cow Clicker, mysteriously, made a nontrivial amount of money. Even though it was deliberately designed to be a parody and not actually fun at all. So the fact that it doesn’t interest you is sortof trivial, since clearly, it was a success by any financial measure, and also apparently by the measure of user devotion, since the number of “No, please don’t shut the game down!” emails the creator received when he announced that he was going to do so actually caused him to have second thoughts and not do so.
The other games are all examples of games that I have played and which while I didn’t think they were ‘fun’ were intriguing and either taught me something or kept my interest despite not being ‘fun’. YMMV.
Fun is a useless word for this discussion - it has no definition that we can agree on. Therefore I move we discard it.
Edit: Some interesting thoughts on game vs story there, but fundamentally I don’t think this HAS to be all about ‘story’ either. Lemme see if I can find some Extra Credits episodes or something.
Reading an article about it (well, transcript of an interview really), it says that the people playing it for the irony and appreciating the satire quickly dropped off and the remaining population demanding more was the same people who play the rest of the games it was meant to parody. In other words, it’s message was almost entirely lost to its remaining audience.
Financially successful in terms of netting the same Skinner box compulsives who play the rest of the Facebook games. As a medium for delivering a greater message, I wouldn’t call it “good”.
I sort of agree. Rather, I think we need to recognize the two extremes of definitions that are being used, and figure out where we feel comfortable using it. And then discard it :).
One extreme definition of “fun” is “any experience that the subject feels is worthwhile for itself.” By that definition, someone might have fun watching Schindler’s List.
The other extreme definition of “fun” is “any experience that inspires happiness with no conflicting or interfering emotions.” By that definition, nobody can have fun watching a thriller, because it makes you feel tense at certain times.
Most folks are going to be somewhere along this continuum. And I think you’re right to get rid of “fun” as a point of debate. Other, more specific terms would be more useful.
Do games that leave the player depressed have any chance of success?
Do games whose gameplay is not exciting have any chance of success?
Do games that are interesting thought experiments, but not interesting to experience, have any chance of success?
I tend to adopt an extreme position for judging creative works, namely that creative works get to define their own criteria for success and be judged on them, AND that each member of the audience also gets to define their own criteria for success and to judge the work on those criteria. A game might succeed on its own merits but fail on mine (Dog Eat Dog). It might fail on its own merits and succeed on mine (Cow-Clicker, if I were one of its crazy players).
Played Today I Die. It was fun. Was it not supposed to be? It was a cute little puzzle game and I spent more time deciding playing with the mechanics than dwelling on any message. Even now I couldn’t give you a message out of it besides some hackneyed “Look, it went from suicide to redemption!” bit.
Addendum to the above: I played it a second time (it’s like a five minute game the first time, a two minute game once you know what you’re doing) and got a different ending due to messing around and changing some things. Ironically, if I wasn’t having fun by screwing around with the figures at the end, I would have never seen the different conclusion.
That said, I’ve kind of exhausted the amusement out of doodling around with the figures so if there’s other branches it could have taken, I’m not likely to find out on my own.
A while back I participated in a game creation workshop led by Scott Nicholson of the Because Play Matters game lab, and it opened with a discussion about what our favorite games were and why we liked them. Nicholson told us we shouldn’t use the word “fun”, not because he’s opposed to fun but because it’s such a vague and subjective term. While “I like Game X because it’s fun to play” might very well be true, it doesn’t express anything about what sort of game this is or what it does well.
Even if one is trying to create a game with no goal other than “Most people who play this game will consider it to be fun”, this involves making a lot of choices about what sort of game it will be, who the target audience is, and what specific elements it should include.
Today I Di**e - I was put off by the title, but on Jophiel’s recommendation, I tried it. It’s a fun, cute game. The story is more like a series of vague emotional impressions, but it worked with the mechanics. I gave it to my boyfriend to play, and he liked it too, but he didn’t have much of a reaction to the story at all, except as a framework for the game.
There are all sorts of words people use instead of fun, like enjoyable, interesting, engaging, entertaining. They all have their own nuances but they are talking about basically the same thing. Games could also be things like artistic, or educational, or moralising, which players might seek out for entirely different, non-fun reasons. Today I Die is not a traditional shooter, but it is still a fun game. The problems with story-telling that marshmallow talked about, you can deal with them, and still be in the realm of ‘fun’, or whatever synonym you want to use. Something like Train (from the other thread) isn’t even trying to be any kind of fun. It’s doing something else entirely.
The problem with that argument is that all of human thought and behavior is a “neurological trick”.
As a rule the result of applying that sort of attitude to entertainment is awful entertainment that isn’t enlightening, either; just pretentious and patronizing. When it isn’t outright horrifying to people who don’t share the same convictions; I recall reading an excerpt from old “enlightening” literature aimed at children that went into explicit detail on children being tortured in Hell.
People have been pushing that sort of thing for ages, and the results have been pretty much uniformly either boring or awful. Works of art can have a strong message, but ones that are self-consciously designed to be “Improving” and to not be “fun” tend to succeed only at being neither enlightening or fun.
Yeah, for instance people mention Schindler’s List but, the thing is, Schindler’s List was a good movie. Beautifully shot, great performances, well written story, played across a range of emotions from fear to humor to sorrow… if it wasn’t about the real story of a guy doing what he did, it STILL would have been an excellent film for having those components.
On the other hand, there’s a ton of films about the Holocaust that pretty much no one watches because, message aside, they just aren’t good films (or as good of films).
In the same fashion, I would expect the best games for carrying a message would be games that are at least competent in their own right. Which would generally mean some permutation of “fun” or “entertaining” or otherwise “I would spend time with these game components and mechanics even without the greater message”.
