   Where Is Story?
  I have an odd question.  When you''re playing, where is story on your mind?At what point are you actually in a story?  Think about your best story experiences in a game.  You''re doing something for a great reason.  It has emotion.  It has gravity.  Maybe you''re sneaking your way into the Master''s headquarters in Fallout.  Or maybe you''re walking down a hall, about to discover Polito''s sad fate in System Shock.  Our maybe you''re at the final battle and about to learn your heritage in Baldur''s Gate.When you account for what you''re actually doing, is it story? It seems to me amid the clicking, the dragging and dropping, the graph bar reading and inventory jostling that something happens to story.  Story-- I mean in terms of the whole web of relationships and plot-- seems to go away, and you''re in the moment of doing stuff in the game.Has this been your experience?  I''ve seen it happen especially in multiplayer, in that quests, and characters, and settings all get boiled down into "what do I do now?"  "Oh, talk to this guy.  Kill that thing.  Go with this girl.  Give her that thing."If that''s the case I''m hard pressed to find the story in it.  Could it be that story is something that happens outside of the "doing stuff" experience, say like before or after.  You get the quest, or the mission briefing, and now you know why   and what   you''re doing, but while you''re doing it story isn''t on your mind.  Could it be that every time you get story, you stop playing, listen, then continue, and they are therefore entirely seperate experiences?  ????    --------------------Just waiting for the mothership...   
  Story, as chains of reasons between events ie. B (knight is enlisted) happens because of A (kidnapped girl) .  I agree that too often in games, the reason  WHY you are doing something is obscured by HAVING to do it . In other words you get a set goal that you have to do at the start of the game, and you concentrate on the Challenge of completing the task it could be said that because you are facing such dificulties in obtaining what you see as the Only goal that matters, that you lose sight of the REASON that you are doing it.Stories in games are often not very dynamic or spontaneous in games. In other words, games seem to have an exposition stage where the goal is shown ie. The princess is kidnapped before your very eyes, you then spend until the middle of the game searching for the Sword of Anson, the Tapir of Befuddling Aromas etc. These goals are presribed by the designer, you have to get these to win. There is little personal involvement in them. Writing for RPGs is about creating a series of characters and events whcih the player may never encounter, or which may happen to the player in a different order.  -- Check out www.ga-rpg.com  The Bioware Mythologies section for some interesting RPG related stuff.My view on stories is that they should give the impression that they are evolving as the player plays, and give the feeling a real sense of involvement in them.  They should not just be the knight in shining indestructible armour that "will" and "must" save the day. Make the player sacrifice things that are personal to him, whether friendships, or magic items, the player should have a hand in the story. They can be shown some of the possibilities of how the future of the world could turn out.If they feel a real involvement in the world, as opposed to carrying out a series of tasks, everything that happens to them could become part of *their* story.Just some ideas...  ;  A wise soul in the design forum once said: In an interactive format, he story is made by what you choose NOT to write.  ;  For me, I like to get drawn into someone else''s story; to begin to feel for them instead of just watching them.  I love that moment in playing a good game when you suddenly realize something about a character, and you begin to think of them more as a person than as a program.  Therefore, the more interesting RPGs, at least to me, are ones where there isn''t that much choice of what you do.  Although having that choice may make things that much better, I felt more involved in games like Final Fantasies 7 + 8 and Xenosaga then I have ever felt in an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game like Baulder''s Gate or NeverWinter Nights.  In fact, Xenosaga is my absolute favorite game in the world because of the amount of time spent seeing a story unfold, instead of walking from place to place, talking to the right people, etc.  I was watching a certain scene in the game when I suddenly realized "oh, this is why he is like this," and felt not only the joy of discovery, but also empathy for the character in question (for those of you who are curious, Ziggy, when he thinks of the dog he gave to his son.  Everything, why he wanted to become a total machine, why he was so hard, etc., suddenly made sense).  I wanted to find out what was going to happen, making me feel like I was a witness to amazing events unfolding before me. ;  Story is everything that happens outside of the repetive game battles. The amount of story in a game boils down to how much of this there really is.  Depending on the designer the game will contain a balance of four factors, battles, story,gameplay, and getting where you need to go.   It depends entirly on the game how much of each you get.   -----------------------------------------------------Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all TradesCurrent Design projectChaos Factor Design Document ;  How about this: story is motivation.  Emotion causing action.  Simple and sweet.  ^_^ ;  Nine times out of ten, the enire story isn''t on my mind, but the stories of individual characters are. For instance, I may like the characters of a story, but not the plot, so I''ll focus on the characters I like.  ;  Usually, if the plot is bad, I''m not interested in the characters, and if the characters are bad, I''m not interested in the plot.  I feel characters are an indivisible part of the plot, and trying to seperate the two is like trying to seperate two parts in a musical piece and trying to compare them by saying one is better.  That is immeterial, all the pieces have to fit together in a way that makes sense and gets the player interested.   ____________________________________________________________official Necromancer of GameDev forums Game Writing section ;  This is a good topic, so... I say that about every topic I bump, don''t I?  Well, I''ll give it a bump just for the heck of it.   ____________________________________________________________official Necromancer of GameDev forums Game Writing section ;  Well, if you (or the player) were sufficiently engaged and immersed in the story, it it not on you mind, you are in it subjectively, it is not something to objectively interpret.  You are immersed, part of the story on one perceptual level or another.  This is one key to suspension of disbelief, likely a prerequisite to catharsis, but I don't want to search for lecture notes at this time.When you account for story, it is likely ratioinated to the degree to which you have suspended disbelief and immersed yourself.  It doesn't go away, it is just the context you are immersed in at the moment within which you make gameplay choices.  It is because we are immersed that the story seems to disappear, and some of our actions may not seem relevant to the story, but, if we were not making gameplay choices and taking action, we would not have chosen to become engaged in the first place enough to start the game loop I think.Also, quality of story has a lot to do with how much it is on your mind, consciously or not.Adventuredesign   [edited by - adventuredesign on December 14, 2003 7:36:55 PM]