Touching on some thoughts adjacent to other recent thoughts.
In the collection of my random thoughts on the Caligula Effect I mentioned an idea I had that I’d finally thought to put into words:
The story has become interesting and I want to keep going but it's being dragged down by the gameplay overstaying its welcome
Almost certainly why I stopped the first one before the end too
I stopped Tales of Arise literally at the last boss
Like got to the save point right in front of the last fight, closed the game because I didn't have time to sit through a 3 hour ending
and was like nah I'm good on this one
Again highlighting that I have a strong preference for gameplay over narrative and that even if your narrative is really really really good if your gameplay can't stretch to cover the whole start to finish then it won't matter for me -even if I want it to-
So here’s the thesis of this post: video games should try to pick one or the other between a focus on story or gameplay and very deliberately not try to do both. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do both, just that you shouldn’t and probably shouldn’t try to. There’s another recent thought I had that sort of meshes with what I’m getting at here:
Part of what I’m dancing around here is that there seems to be a natural dichotomy between the kind of manager who is pursuing metrics and is focused on pleasing upper management and the kind of manager who is prioritizing the quality of life of employees under them. I don’t think you can’t do both, but I think the far majority of most people are not effectively capable of doing both. My impression is that in most cases the simplest path is to do one at the expense of the other—that doing this is easier macro—whereas navigating the intricacies of both requires a very high level of business finesse—is a tougher micro.
In my opinion, you cannot have a good game without good gameplay. Yes, I am extremely aware there are lots of people who very strongly disagree with this. Unfortunately, since this is my Substack we’re going to make the case that I am Objectively™ correct and everyone who disagrees are uncultured haters.
Of course I’m being tongue-in-cheek there, but before we go on we need to touch on the idea of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, because there’s variable degree to which story is gameplay. These ideas come from an excellent, borderline academic video by Matthewmatosis, the gist of which goes something like this:
Video games bring enjoyment to the player by desire fulfillment1. In the abstract, this usually takes the form of goal attainment—the goal-directed-ness of video games is part of what makes video games relatively unique as a medium. There tends to be a mixture of extrinsic motivation—goals or challenges presented to the player from the (design of the) game (in other words, motivation extrinsic to—coming from outside of—the player)—and intrinsic motivation—goals and desires set by the player’s own preferences unique and internal to them and outside of the game. Games can and will try to predict and cater to your intrinsic motivations but generally their bread and butter is extrinsic motivation. A game having achievements is extrinsic motivation, whether or not you care about achievements is intrinsic motivation.
Some things can be both in different contexts, chiefly here, narrative can be both. A desire to reach the next beat of a compelling story can be extrinsically motivated; a desire to have a video game tell you a story can be intrinsic motivation. But even when this is true, it’s never an absolute truth in game design, as Matthewmatosis highlights:
Assuming a developer just wants to create a broadly appealing game it might seem wise to include as much extrinsic motivation as possible, but there are at least some exceptions where motivations can conflict with one another. Cutscenes always take some amount of time to resolve, so if a developer includes cutscenes in an effort to maximize a player's narrative motivation they will inevitably cause some portion of narrative-averse players to suffer, however slightly. Every second indulging the story is another second that player's intrinsic desires are not being met which causes their average enjoyment to drop. Put simply, extrinsic motivation can backfire.
The first beat of my case here is that, while story can be both, it will only ever always be extrinsic motivation. There will always be a portion of players that will not care about the story, whereas all (but an ignorable, unserious minority of) players will be intrinsically motivated to interact with the gameplay of a video game. We’ll come back to how this problem with story in regard to motivation is inverted for gameplay, and some ways to work around this.
So why am I arguing we should nix story? Trick question: I’m not, go read my first part again:
So here’s the thesis of this post: video games should try to pick one or the other between a focus on story or gameplay and very deliberately not try to do both.
I don’t think you can’t do both, but I think the far majority of most people are not effectively capable of doing both.
Substitute “game studios” for “people” in the last sentence, same difference.
So why do I think you can’t do both? Let’s start by critiquing writing in games, broadly. This is a two-pronged argument: most video game writing is not imaginative enough for the medium and most video game writing just deliberately eschews the medium to its own detriment. The crux of my argument is really about writing in video games, since that’s the back half of what I believe “most game studios are not effectively capable of doing both” of.
We’re going to jump straight to a controversial example here: The Last of Us.
The chief problem with the Last of Us games isn’t that they’re eschewing gameplay for a bad story, it’s that they’re eschewing gameplay for a mediocre story. It’s fair to say the themes of the Last of Us are quite universalizable, but in the games they are not presented in a way that is served by the medium2. I’m less skeptical of claims that the Last of Us TV show is a good TV show than claims that the games are good games. I’m going to duck pedantic arguments about how true this is to point out how little is lost if you supercut all the games’ cutscenes.
This isn’t even an unfair criticism being aimed at only the Last of Us, lots of games have this problem. The first one that comes to mind for me, a game from a series that is elsewise considered to be quite laudable, even for how it interweaves story and gameplay: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. When that game first came out someone made a 10-hour cut of all the cutscenes, several of the CODEC calls, and a little bit of the gameplay (mostly boss fights) for context. And it was frankly a pretty complete experience. Some of this is Kojima being Kojima but also probably most modern JRPGs—and frankly most modern Japanese games in general—have this problem. You could supercut most of, say, Tales of Arise, maybe leave in a couple of the more plot-important boss fights, and you wouldn’t strictly be missing a lot.
Now obviously this idea has problems when taken to its extremes. If we took every action game that had cutscenes and reduce them to only the cutscenes, sure you may or may not have a coherent story but chances are very high that you wouldn’t have a complete experience3. Likewise, if you took every action game and completely removed the story, even if your game is really good and engaging, it starts to look kind of weird4.
To apply some reductionism here, you can say as a general rule that bad writing can always be rescued by great gameplay, but excellent writing is not even a guaranteed hedge against bad gameplay. But more than that, one should be seeking to include the elements of gameplay in the narrative, lest you be taking the worst of both worlds by making a movie require controller inputs. The simple example here is classic point and click adventure games or CRPGs, where exploration is the gameplay element informing the narrative. The most complex example I can think of are the Pathologic games, where the games being unfair and oppressive are important elements of the ennui the game is going for.
So what are some of the identifiable ways story and gameplay can mesh well, maybe even regardless of writing quality—are there some lindy ways we can make this work?
I’m going to make two broad suggestions here: a) have lore instead of story and b) focus on gameplay first with the goal of making players care about the world they’re in before you start trying to tell the story you want to tell.
First off, I’m skipping out on a lot of good examples where the story and gameplay are both unambiguously great. I’m approaching this section like I’m talking to someone who wants to find a way to make this work ex nihilo. If you’re dead set on telling some story and don’t care about your players’ experience, or still have it in your head that you’re going to be the next Josh Sawyer, then you’re wasting your time here and have probably already stopped reading to tell me how wrong I am after the first couple paragraphs.
First, let’s talk about story versus lore. I’m going to snipe a good comparison of these from Tetramorre:
The difference between story and lore […] may not be obvious, but here's an example. Let's say I want to tell you a story but here's how I tell it to you: “my local grocery store sells Colombian coffee, I make coffee with a French press, and in my kitchen is an empty bag of Colombian coffee beans and a dirty French Press. A half full bottle of antidepressants is in my kitchen cabinet.”
That's not really a story, is it? It's more of a collection of knowledge related to an event, otherwise known as lore. By looking at this evidence one can likely surmise that I, at some point, went to my local grocery store, bought Colombian coffee, made it in a French press, and then forgot to clean it up. However this is all circumstantial, because that collection of lore is so disjointed and vague, we can't definitely say that this is the case. It also lacks anything stories need to be interesting: a lot characters and interactions, drama, or any semblance of a plot.
Now let me actually tell you a story: “last month I went to my local grocery store and bought a bag of coffee. The grocer, whose name is Dan, waved at me vigorously as I stepped inside.
‘Doing all right?’ he said as I checked out.
‘Yeah, I mean, I've been better but this coffee should help.’ I waved goodbye as I left, a small smile creeping up on my face.
I went home and made some coffee but didn't clean it up and so the French Press started growing mold.”
This is the most basic form of story you can be in, it has a beginning, middle, and end. It has characters that interact with some dialogue that hints at details about said characters. Now what this story is lacking in is those details. For example, why did I decide to buy the coffee? While this question sounds like it'd be simple to answer with “I like coffee”, it's also an opportunity for character development that I'm missing. We also don't know what kind of coffee it is or why I didn't clean the French press for a month, something that is not easily explained away with laziness.
Taking the lore from the last paragraph into account, however, can give us some insight. The coffee was Colombian. I needed coffee because I thought it might help me with my depression, but I didn't clean the French Press because of said depression, so presumably it didn't work. A lot of video games use lore and story in tandem in order to more naturally convey character development without needing to come right out and say it. Movies do this too, particularly with little details like the Furnishings of an apartment or messiness of a bedroom. That stuff is lore, it is knowledge about a story but the important part is that it is not a story in itself, it on its own lacks important elements of stories that make them interesting. Lore can increase a story's depth but it cannot itself be a story.
I’ll be a bit more reductionist and say that lore is information about a setting with static context (or without context at all) and story is information about a setting with continuous context. Think of it on a timeline, a story a continuous (or pieces of continuous) narrative along that timeline whereas lore (or any of its synonyms, such as, say, environmental storytelling) are disjointed points in the timeline of that world. Story is a video file playing from start to finish, lore is individual frames from that video or still photographs.
As a game designer, one should prefer lore to story because it allows you to do two important things. First, having this preference enshrined in your design strategy will help direct you to produce a refined gameplay experience without having to sacrifice worldbuilding. Our flagship example here is FromSoft. They’ll also help support my second point but I have a better example there.
The second thing is that having a looser, lore-focused narrative is incredible for player engagement outside of the game. My flagship example here, as foreshadowed by the Tetramorre link, is Five Nights at Freddy's. FNAF and its sequels arguably have palpably bad gameplay, and, while they are top shelf horror react content, nothing else explains it’s roiling, lasting popularity and outrageous success better than how compelling it is as a piecemeal lore mystery. Ambiguity in storytelling can be great in every medium, but works exceptionally well in media that attracts fan communities—works exceptionally well in video games.
Lore-focused narratives allow the observer to feel like a part of the world by requiring their interpretation, requiring you to bring a part of yourself into the world, allowing you to use your own life experiences to interpret the context. “Well I think it’s this way because of this.” Lore tends to have a liminality that sparks the imagination in a particular way. Lore also requires active engagement and tends to be optional, which means both that players who are intrinsically motivated to spend time thinking about it can get a lot out of stretching their imagination, and the players intrinsically motivated to keep playing the game can move on and not be especially worse off for it5.
Plus let’s not underestimate the fun in pondering a deep mystery6.
Circling back, my second broad suggestion was to avoid the temptation to start telling a story before you’ve made your players care about the world and characters with which that story will take place.
The example I use to illustrate this is how I tend to play MMOs. For me, most MMOs I play are about the game and the social environment, usually my first characters rush through the “story” quests to get to the fun dungeon crawling and boss fights. Inevitably, however, the longer I spend in the world the more interested I become in the context for that world, and over time the story tends to be something I make new characters to go back and pay closer attention to. Lore-as-extrinsic-motivation can cultivate interest in the setting as intrinsic motivation.
I suppose more than anything else this is the kind of thing that’s to every individual’s taste. The best appeal I can make here is that you’re increasingly competing for your players’ limited time and attention and you’re probably not being well-served by giving us the Tolkien lore dump backstory for your setting in the opening cutscene, even for the players that might want that.
There are additional suggestions I can make for routing around this. Focus on having your game start in the middle of an important conflict informed by the story you’d like to tell. Do the Vaan thing and have your initial main character be someone ancillary to the main plot. Having a customizable character kind of helps cheat this problem by inviting you to self-insert from the start.
As always, I have trouble finding a good ending for these, so uhhhhhhhhhh here:
Probably, this is generalizable to everything ever.
With exceptions, for example I’ll say it’s a creative reinforcement of the games’ themes to have characters react in real time when you kill random mooks as though those mooks were someone important to someone else in another context.
This is point one where I’ll suggest some game studios divert their resources to making shows or movies instead of games. I suspect the reason this doesn’t happen more often is because it makes the flaws in the writing much more obvious.
There’s an obvious alternative that takes advantage of this weirdness that we’ll get to in a moment.
I also think this is why “walking simulators” aren’t completely irredeemable even when their gameplay tends to be lackluster and nonexistent-on-paper. I think museum-style experiences work fine in video games as long as they’re the kind of thing you expect going in.
I want to toss out one more example here before moving on, something that worked really well for me but probably didn’t for a lot of people: the opening of Final Fantasy XIII. It has a pretty tight, short opening sequence before it gets to gameplay (and does a great job of pacing out flashback sequences to fill in the recent past), but it also just kind of dumps a lot of extremely foreign concepts and terminology on you right out the gate. And I thought that was kind of neat, for one it made the world feel appropriately alien but also I was a little more engaged, paying a little closer attention than I might otherwise, trying to pick up on the local language.