> Video game stories are those things I have to quickly click through to get to the next bit of action.

I don't think you're in the opposite camp as he is. Your point above is essentially his Observation 2.

> the vast majority of players just tune out the story. As long as you let them skip past it, it's fine.

This is what I do since, I don't know, King's Quest series? After the death of adventure games I don't care about stories anymore. The graphics and the gameplay carry all the weight now. The Assassin's Creed series-what is this Animus crap? Just make the character be that assassin guy instead of switching to some pandering story about a time computer. Seeing what they did to ancient settings and bringing these cities to life is cool but have no time for little stories.

I can’t stand that animus stuff honestly I usually turn it off after one of those scenes just to wash it away. Totally destroys the game for me (which I only just started with origins and odyssey)

I think this is typical of one-playthrough stuff.

You'll be so concerned with adapting your brain to the mechanics and artificial limitations on a semi-real-appearing world (cue Zero Punc's knee high fence stalwart joke), do you have time for any story of complexity?

If a game is good, you'll play through twice. THEN if they're really good, you'll pick up more of the story, especially easter eggs if they are competent.

RE: edgy cred, yeah, that's still the maturation of the market. The problem with video games still remains the catering-to-teenager previous two decades. It's like any large budget or worthwhile game was all shonen manga. And really it still has that core.

Video games will eventually branch out. I bring up manga, because I think games in Japan have always been more about characters, plot, and complexity, and had more offball ones.

The characters in American games are still pretty crappy. Consider that DOOM and Halo are headed by... generic McToxicMale-SchwartzeneggerPredator-In-A-Helmet. All the other shooter games were stuck in the same rut.

Never being one to avoid shamelessly plugging my book ("book" -- see what I did there?)

We played MazeWar at Xerox in the late 70s. The guy on the cover of my book is Jeffrey Smith, the son of Dave Smith, the inventor of icons. The story ("story" -- see? I did it there again) is that Dave and his wife Janet, 2 weeks overdue with Jeffrey, went to PARC to kill some time, she saw the bloody eyeball on the screen, and the adrenaline made her go into labor and deliver Jeffrey.

I found a working Alto, and shot the photograph in Nov. 2020, using the real MazeWar software. He loved reenacting the family legend.

[1] https://www.albertcory.io

I feel like you are providing an example.

I came to this thread to read a thread about videogame stories. Imagine my surprise (wait, this is HN), when the first thing that I see is your comment about videogames that isn't really about videogames it's a way for you to sell your book, which you admit you are shameless about.

But I just wanted to reed about videogames. If you were more subtle, if you knew how tll me a story without telling me that you are telling a story, then it's not wasting my time and I can get what I came for as well as what you want me to learn.

I'd tend to agree.

I think games need to be better about "picking a camp". Many games try to force a strong narrative into an open world design, and both qualities end up faltering because of it. Examples: Mass Effect, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, most Ubisoft games.

The best open world games tell very light narrative. They may have tons of lore to fall upon and discover, but there's otherwise very little arc to the narrative you're progressing through during your time in the game. Examples: Dark Souls 1, Breath of the Wild.

The best narratively-focused games severely limit players' freedoms in how to approach the high-level narrative beats. Some great ones do give some freedoms in how to approach tactical situations (The Last of Us 2), but this doesn't impact the broader arc. Other examples: Bioshock/Infinite, Nier Automata, Portal 2.

There are vanishingly few examples of games which actually do both with high competence. I'd list: Witcher 3, Red Dead 2, Dragon Age Origins as examples. One quality shared among these games is how weak their high level narrative is allowed to be, in exchange for much stronger shorter side-narratives. When people say Witcher 3 has a great story, what they really mean is: It tells tons of very high quality short stories. Similarly with RDR2, the overarching "end of the cowboy" narrative is great, but its the ambient storytelling of the world that sells it as having great storytelling chops.

The bigger issue with narratively-focused games is how the game needs to convince the player that this was worth being a game, and not a TV Show. I feel games like those listed above (TLOU2, Bioshock, Nier, Portal) do this very well, because the beat-to-beat gameplay is compelling despite the strict world architecture. But, many other games which tell strong narratives falter too quickly in providing great gameplay (Telltale games, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch) to justify it being a game. I don't generally hold this against the game, because ultimately if you want to tell a great narrative, and you know how to build games, you'll tell that narrative through a game, that ain't bad, its just one medium among many. But I also fully understand the counter-argument; its sold as a game. People have expectations going into a game, that it won't be a movie, yet that's basically all Telltale ever made, Bandersnatch-style clickable movies.

Discussions like this are one of the things I love about gaming; its such a nascent medium, its still trying to find its footing and what makes a game great. Why is Breath of the Wild so much better than Immortals: Fenyx Rising? I've played both a ton, I've thought about it a ton, and I still don't feel that I have a compelling answer which wouldn't be a 200 page essay. BotW copied a ton of gameplay elements from earlier Ubisoft games. Ubisoft then copied a ton of gameplay elements from BotW for Immortals. Yet, the Ubisoft products are never as good. What makes BotW special? Can Nintendo replicate it for BotW2? Do they even want to? Probably not; despite developing the same franchises for decades, Nintendo rarely retreads gameplay ground; so, follow-up question, how the hell is Nintendo so good at consistently creating new gameplay experiences? Why have so vanishingly few companies replicated their production success?

I think this is really just a matter of subjective values.

Mass Effect, God of War, and Horizon Zero Dawn are in my list of favourite games of all time.

I couldn’t stand Red Dead 2 until I stopped doing the open world things and started just following the story.

Breath of the Wild is cool, but it definitely hasn’t captured me like these other games have.

I have never been able to stick with a Souls games, but I devoured Detroit: Beyond Human and the Telltale Walking Dead games

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but when you ask “is it good?” You need to consider what people are looking for. Personally, I’m looking for something that is technically fun but also leans closer to being an interactive movie/book

I wouldn't begin to assert that those games are bad; just that their decision to mesh strong cohesive narrative with open world design ends up doing a disservice to both the narrative and the open world. That doesn't mean the game as a whole is bad.

I can pull Mass Effect (lets say ME2, as its oftentimes cited as the strongest entry in the trilogy) as a nearly inassailable example of this dichotomy games are faced with (and this post does have spoilers for ME2, though not horribly big ones)

One of the biggest issues with ME2 narrative structure is a direct consequence of the open world design; the ludonarrative dissonance of talking with a crew member, being told "the ship my dad died on just started broadcasting a distress signal, ten years later, Shepherd we gotta go check it out right now", then agreeing to check it out, then waiting ten quests or 10 real world hours to go check it out. The narrative introduces urgency; the open world gives the player the agency to ignore that urgency. It would be powerful if the game recognized this, and tweaked dialog to say something like "well I would have liked to check it out sooner, but this will have to do" once you finally get around to it, but it does not; instead, it leaves us with the ludonarrative dissonance of everyone pretending like this is priority #1, has always been priority #1, even though I just spent thirty minutes in the captain's cabin trying on some new armor.

Same game: You speak with Samara, she says something like "its so refreshing to work with a crew of friends again, and to help you with your mission." Not once did I take Samara on a mission; she says this dialog no matter how often you deploy on missions with her.

Same game: Grunt is complaining about having an insatiable need to kill stuff, and his loyalty mission is to get him checked out by the Krogans. At first, I was like; woah! I also never took Grunt on any missions, not even once; is this the game reacting to him being locked up in his room all day, creating dynamic content in response to my gameplay decisions? A true integration of open world and narrative, player decisions impacting the way the story progresses in a deep and meaningful way? It isn't. He'll do that even if he's by your side for every mission killing thousands of mercenaries.

Here's the gist of it: When games try to integrate an open world with strong narrative, it is possible to do it in a fantastic and meaningful way, where the open world actually supports and builds upon the narrative. Imagine if refusing to utilize squad mates led to their desertion, which led to more missions to win them back, or spending all day side-questing leads them to ask questions about what their mission really is and why they joined.

By and large, games fail to do this, because its VERY hard. Open world games are exponential multivariadic systems; the player has a thousand things they can do at any time, trying to account for every thousand of those things, write dialog lines, record voice-over, in twenty languages... its impossibly difficult. Games which go beyond competent in this regard (and Mass Effect is FAR BEYOND competent; its VERY good) should be held up as paragons of the artform, because they attempted to integrate the thing video games do best (open-ended interactivity) with a more traditional narrative structure. But that doesn't mean sacrifices weren't made, and ultimately for me it comes down to: Mass Effect is a FANTASTIC game... but its narrative isn't.

>People have expectations going into a game, that it won't be a movie...

As a counter-example, we have series like Metal Gear Solid, which are renowned for the huge use of cutscenes (MGS4 having an ending cutscene that's practically feature-length). Admittedly, this style of in-depth storytelling is not everyone's cup of tea (especially those for whom the second point made by the OP applies), but it is a very effective storytelling tool that works well in the series. The games are predominantly not, however, open-world, unlike the other games you mention. The cinematic storytelling would probably not translate well. Indeed, MGSV, which was open-world, mostly used in-game audio tapes to be played at the player's discretion, with any cutscenes being mostly contained to specific missions. So I think the exact requirements for good storytelling really depend on the style of game and on what your players expect from it. But much of what the OP says about good writing still stands, such as finding a Whedon-esque sweet spot of serious/comedy and using original jokes.

It's funny you mention RDR2. For me it's the best example of why I hate fixed characters in open world video games. The protagonist in RDR2 is a perfect representation of my uncle. Looks like him, sounds like him, dresses pretty close. Now I like my uncle and all but have no desire to spend 40 hours or so playing him in a video game. I did not last long in single player. Multiplayer was cool but it turned in to the same as the first: a Texas hold-um simulator with a very involved character customization mini game...

I am just wondering what kind of a narrative was forced in "Horizon: Zero Dawn"? You aren't saying that the main character had to side with the camp that wanted to wipe out humanity, or?

As for the mini-factions and side quests, there I can agree -- these are practically the only weak point of the game.

For someone like me who doesn't really like the passive experience of movies/TV, story-heavy games are a good thing. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of my favorite games of all time.

Edith Finch is one of my favorite games of all time, as well.

I debated not including it on the above list, because one of the things it does absolutely fantastically well is, lets call it, ludonarrative resonance. The opposite of ludonarrative dissonance; it synergizes gameplay and story to such an incredibly powerful degree, that its story is made better by the gameplay, and its gameplay (what it has) is made better by the story.

That being said, its gameplay is more in the Firewatch/Telltale category than, say, Mass Effect.

Another game which feels squarely in the ludonarrative resonant category is Celeste. If you've played Celeste, you know: its a hell of a frustrating experience. Your experience clearing those platforming challenges precisely mirrors Madeline's experience scaling the mountain. You'll have moments where you'll tell yourself "this game is too hard for me", "I can't do this", just like how Badeline tries to convince Madeline that she isn't good enough to climb the mountain. In the end, you never stop feeling frustrated; you learn to live with the frustration, as it pushes you to be a better player; just as Madeline learns to live with her ugly side, and it makes them both better for it by giving you a double dash for the last level.

Celeste could never be a movie; its narrative is too simple to work outside a form of interactive media, where the interactivity empowers the narrative by creating in you the same emotions being narrated through the main character.

Nintendo has a different core business model, one which is hard to replicate in another public corporation because it goes against the norm of making the quarterly results look as good as possible: Instead of scoring a hit and immediately trying to line up out yearly sequels, or trying to greenlight productions based on a marketing pitch alone, Nintendo typically rotates out IPs to match with prototypes and marketing concepts that have been on the go for a while. Likewise, they tend not to go the route of filling the shelves with a checklisted set of SKUs(e.g. 1 action, 1 RPG, 1 sports game per business quarter) - they will jump on some trends and occasionally dabble in clones and sequels, but their bread and butter has come from a more gradual approach of making each product focused, coherent and unique versus making it incrementally better than a competitor.

Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.

The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.

> there are plenty of video games that action wise I have no problem letting my kid play but can't due to the story and mainly the cut scenes.

Examples?

Sengoku Rance is my favorite example of this — a hentai game whose game mechanics and plot are so engrossing that no one sticks around for the hentai

Endless examples. But currently Diablo 2 Resurrected and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.