Desire and obstacle the building blocks of gaming narratives susan o'connor
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Humans are born storytellers. We use them to understand our world — and in the gaming universe, stories can become our guides. But players don't want to hear a story - they want to create a story. How can we build narratives that allow players freedom of choice — but still deliver a meaningful, emotional experience? The answer is desire — and obstacle. By developing an understanding what the player wants from the game — and then building a storyline that fuels that desire — game developers can create an experience that connects with players and inspires them to keep playing until the final level.
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Desire and obstacle the building blocks of gaming narratives susan o'connor
- 1. Desire and obstacle: storytelling in games By Susan O’Connor for Paris Game Connection 2014
- 15. But don’t characters in games have desires?
- 23. 1. Avatars who don’t really care too much
- 24. 2. Avatars who are kidding themselves
- 25. 3. Avatar as sidekick
- 28. 4. Avatar as opponent
- 32. 5. Avatar as pawn
Editor's Notes
- susanoconnorwriter.com susan@susanoconnorwriter.com
- I write for games. My first game was Girl Talk, a slumber party game for girls) shipped as a CD-ROM!
- Then, I found myself over here. You can see how one game would lead to the other.
- I’ve worked on about 25 projects, including BioShock…
- Far Cry 2…
- And Tomb Raider. We’ve been telling stories in games for a long time. But the irony is this:
- Games don’t need stories. But they do have more impact when they have purpose, and meaning. And story creates meaning. (Save the princess!) So we keep trying to introduce story into games. So how are we doing? Are we learning how to tell stories in games? Well let’s start by looking at other forms of storytelling. (This is a question Jesse Schell asked in his wonderful Future of Storytelling talk in 2013)
- Playwrights have learned how to tell a story in their medium. Four hundred years after Shakespeare, we are still performing his plays exactly as they first appeared, despite all the changes in language. We want to experience his plays exactly as they were intended.
- Audiences have experienced fantastic stories on the silver screen. (Rushmore — this is a great movie; if you haven’t seen it, watch it)
- And we are in the golden age of television. (Exhibit A: Breaking Bad.) How about games? What’s our example of the greatest game story ever?
- Final fantasy. yeah!… :/ one of these things is not like the other one. we have a ways to go. so what needs to change? What needs to change? Better writers? Better graphics? Better actors? We’ve tried all those things, with mixed results We still have a long way to go Maybe the problem is not our tools or our talent…
- … but our understanding of the medium itself , about the fundamentals of storytelling, the building blocks of story maybe we’ve been approaching it all wrong And that’s what I want to talk about today
- Let’s start with the basics, storytelling 101: desire and obstacle
- In most forms of storytelling, this is very clear. You create characters, you give them something they want, and you make life hard for them.
- And of course games make life hard for players. In most games, you’ve got obstacles at every turn. And don’t those protagonists in those games have desires?
- Yes! And we pour our heart and soul and budgets into them. Sometimes millions of dollars, months of effort and what do players do?
- They skip all the cutscenes. why? don’t gamers like stories?
- Yes! They do In fact they love story so much they’re already telling a story to themselves about what they’re doing . Each player’s experience is unique, and they’re driving it. That’s more interesting than anything we could tell them. If game’s story doesn’t line up with player’s story, player will ignore game’s story, talk over it, skip cutscenes, etc
- Maybe the problem is cinematics! Maybe games should stop using cinematics, and just start telling story during gameplay…Mmm, maybe
- (video)
- Over half of the people that watch that previous video don’t see the gorilla on first viewing. When people are engaged with a task, they have an incredible ability to tune everything out. Including gorillas. In games, story is the gorilla. It doesn’t matter how great we make our characters, or how compelling their dilemma - players play as themselves. and they want what they want, and they only pay attention to what is important to them.
- Player desire and avatar desire are not the same. For years, we have assumed they were the same; they are not. And yet we need the avatars to have SOME desire, some reason for doing what they’re doing. How do we do that and still give the player room to want what HE wants, which is to play/beat the game? Here are some ways we’ve tried to solve this storytelling dilemma.
- Solution #1: weak desire line. The girl is mentioned at the beginning, and never again. Player is then free to play the game as he sees fit. The result is player agency, but no emotional complexity. That’s the solution we have seen in many games. In this approach, the game’s narrative pays lip service to desire, but then story gets completely out of the way for gameplay Avatar is essentially a sock puppet for the player.
- Solution #2: create avatars that are lying to themselves about what they want. (You want to get off the island? Then why are you spending all your time killing people? Go find a boat!) This creates player agency, but cognitive dissonance – a character you don’t trust, and therefore don’t bond with. This approach works in other mediums, but can be annoying in games.
- Solution #3: Player and avatar don’t have to have the same desire line - but they can be complementary.
- Video clip from Mass Effect 3
- Notice that the avatar, Shephard, doesn’t just repeat the player’s line. He follows up with commentary of his own, finishing your thought, almost as if you’re a little team. That’s something sort of new in games (although we’ve seen it in other media for hundreds of years). Technology is catching up with content and human behavior.
- What if the game is antagonistic? What kind of relationship is possible between player and avatar during nonstop battle?
- Video clip from God of War
- The gods want Kratos to kill Ares. He says he’ll do it…
- …if the gods will take his memories away from him. As a player, I *want* to see these memories. What I want and what Kratos wants are in direct opposition. But it works.
- What if…the player is not the protagonist? At all?
- Video clip from BioShock
- BioShock won several writing awards — but the story from player-as-protagonist is not compelling. It’s the other characters who feel three-dimensional, real.
- Andrew Ryan had a very powerful desire line.
- And powerful obstacles The player knows it’s a game. but for non player characters, the storyline is truly life or death.
- THAT’S where the storytelling potential really lies, with the NPCs.
- I think for years we’ve assumed that the player is the main character. He just isn’t. That is a hard lesson to learn but I think that’s the key to great storytelling in games.
- Chris Swain from USC has an incredible prophecy about what will happen in the 21st century with games. He argues that film was not taken seriously as a medium until it learned to talk. When it was silent, people said “ah, it’s kind of silly, it’s for kids.”
- But once film learned to talk, it became “the literature of the 20th century.”
- What are games waiting for? They know how to talk. Chris Swain argues that no, they are waiting for something else…
- They are waiting to learn to listen. Once games learn to listen and have a conversation, they’ll become the literature of the 21st century. If we are going to do something great in our medium, it is going to show up this way
- Our machines are already learning how to listen, aren’t they?
- Mario never remembers you, from game to game. Well what if he did? We already have persistent databases for games; why don’t we have persistent databases for characters? Someone who remembers our past games, and can show videos from them…and then you can pass you avatar down to your kids and grandkids so they can play with them too. This opens up incredible opportunities for storytelling in games.
- Games writers in 2014 are a lot like TV writers in 1983 Doing their best, but so much more is possible. Who knows what we will see in games in the next ten years…it’s an exciting time.